Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

← FTR#1234 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lie?, Part 7   |   Nancy Pelosi Channels Stepan Bandera →

FTR#1235 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lie?, Part 8

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ March 19, 2022Post a comment Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post
Tags  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You can sub­scribe to e‑mail alerts from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to the com­ments made on pro­grams and posts–an excel­lent source of infor­ma­tion in, and of, itself, HERE.

WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE.

Mr. Emory’s entire life’s work is avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve, avail­able for a con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more (to KFJC). Click Here to obtain Dav­e’s 40+ years’ work, com­plete through Late Fall of 2021 (through FTR #1215).

“Polit­i­cal language…is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to pure wind.”

— George Orwell, 1946

­­­FTR#1235 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24

NB: This descrip­tion con­tains mate­r­i­al not includ­ed in the broad­cast itself.

Intro­duc­tion: This pro­gram con­tin­ues analy­sis of the Ukraine war. The title of this series comes from Mort Sahl, who voiced the ques­tion in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

Charges and counter-charges in the ongo­ing Ukraine war sur­round Pen­ta­gon-financed “vet­eri­nary” and oth­er  bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries in Ukraine.

We note that there are sig­nif­i­cant con­nec­tions between the agency over­see­ing the Ukrain­ian projects and insti­tu­tions impli­cat­ed in the appar­ent “bio-skull­dug­gery” sur­round­ing the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare gam­bit involv­ing what Mr. Emory has termed “The Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy.” This is dis­cussed in: FTR#‘s 1157–1159, 1170, 1183through 1193, and 1215.

The essence of the “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy” gam­bit con­cerns the DTRA and Pen­ta­gon fund­ing of bat-borne coro­n­avirus research at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, much of it through Peter Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance. Once the research was com­plete, it result­ed in pub­li­ca­tion which includ­ed the genome of the bat virus­es being researched. Using tech­nol­o­gy dis­cussed below, the virus­es were then syn­the­sized from scratch and pop­u­la­tion groups were vec­tored with the same viral strains being researched by the WIV. 

Just as Lee Har­vey Oswald was set up to look like a com­mu­nist before being framed for JFK’s mur­der, so, too the “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy” was set up to take the blame for the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

Essen­tial back­ground infor­ma­tion to eval­u­ate the debate:

  1. The alleged dif­fer­ence between “offen­sive” and “defen­sive” bio­log­i­cal war­fare research is aca­d­e­m­ic: If one if research­ing how “wee beast­ies” infect, sick­en and/or kill plants, ani­mals or humans, it is the same research, what­ev­er ter­mi­nol­o­gy one uses.
  2. Con­tem­po­rary tech­nol­o­gy makes it pos­si­ble to syn­the­size dead­ly pathogens from scratch: ” . . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body. Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sised. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said [Michael] Impe­ri­ale. ‘It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
  3. The essen­tial para­me­ters of the fact find­ing: ” . . . . So do bio labs exist inside Ukraine, and is the US sup­port­ing them? Yes, and yes. Ukraine does oper­ate bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries which receive US fund­ing. . . .”
  4. ” . . . . Do the Ukraine lab­o­ra­to­ries store dan­ger­ous bio­log­i­cal agents? Yes, it appears so. [!] As part of their work research­ing dis­eases the bio labs do seem to hold dan­ger­ous pathogens. . . .”

The debate cen­ters on U.S. Pen­ta­gon-financed lab­o­ra­to­ries in Ukraine. Note that the lab­o­ra­to­ries are described as “vet­eri­nary laboratories”–the Pen­ta­gon is in the busi­ness of war-fight­ing, which essen­tial­ly con­sists of killing peo­ple and destroy­ing prop­er­ty. They are not in the busi­ness of tak­ing care of pup­py dogs and kit­ty cats.

Vet­eri­nar­i­ans are viewed as opti­mum for bio­log­i­cal war­fare work, because they do not have to take the Hip­po­crat­ic Oath.

Key con­sid­er­a­tions in the con­tro­ver­sy:

  1. ” . . . . [Robert Pope, the direc­tor of the Pentagon’s Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion Pro­gram] not­ed that some of the facil­i­ties may con­tain pathogens once used for Sovi­et-era bioweapons pro­grams, but he empha­sized that the Ukrain­ian labs cur­rent­ly did not have the abil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture bioweapons. . . . In a March inter­view with the Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists . . . . He spoke specif­i­cal­ly about the Pentagon’s sup­port of 14 vet­eri­nary lab­o­ra­to­ries that pro­vide Ukraine with sam­pling and diag­nos­tic abil­i­ties to detect infec­tious dis­eases. . . .”
  2. The Pen­tagon’s Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion Pro­gram is part of the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency. the for­mer was involved in research­ing bats and dead­ly pathogens: ” . . . . the U.S. mil­i­tary — specif­i­cal­ly the Depart­ment of Defense’s Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion Pro­gram — began fund­ing research involv­ing bats and dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing the coro­n­avirus­es MERS and SARS, a year pri­or in 2017. . . .”
  3. Peter Daszak–of Ukrain­ian heritage–heads the Eco­Health Alliance, the largest mil­i­tary con­trac­tor receiv­ing funds from the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency: ” . . . . Metic­u­lous inves­ti­ga­tion of U.S. gov­ern­ment data­bas­es reveals that Pen­ta­gon fund­ing for the Eco­Health Alliance from 2013 to 2020, includ­ing con­tracts, grants and sub­con­tracts, was just under $39 mil­lion. Most, $34.6 mil­lion, was from the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruc­tion and impro­vised threat net­works.’. . .”
  4. Fur­ther review of Shi’s research fund­ing [at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy] from the Pen­ta­gon, via Eco­Health Alliance: ” . . . . Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months. . . .”
  5. The DTRA fund­ing of bat-borne coro­novirus research at WIV gains fur­ther grav­i­tas: “. . . . A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der. To see how the first paper, ‘Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,’ is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty. . . .”

Doc­u­ments removed by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine–but archived by the Way­back Machine–confirm that the DTRA is among the sources of fund­ing for DOD-fund­ed labs in Ukraine. Note, too, the fact that many of these labs are “vet­eri­nary” labs. Vet­eri­nar­i­ans are high­ly-regard­ed for bio­log­i­cal war­fare recruit­ment, because they do not have to sign the Hip­po­crat­ic Oath.

One must ask the ques­tion, also, as to why the Embassy sud­den­ly removed these doc­u­ments?

The West–in this case a high­ly-placed Colonel in the UK’s CBW estab­lish­ment–are echo­ing the ver­biage about Russ­ian “false-flag” pos­si­bil­i­ties.

In light of the West­’s false flag oper­a­tions in the last ten years, that should alert us to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of Rus­sia being set up for a Ukraine/U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare false-flag.

Note that the “expert”–Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon–has “set the table” for “false-flag” chem­i­cal attacks in Syr­ia.

The over­all theme of the pro­grams to be pre­sent­ed in this long series is cap­tured in an obser­va­tion made by Glenn Pinch­back.

In 1961, the Joint Chiefs were push­ing for a first strike on the Sovi­et Union–a deci­sion to ini­ti­ate nuclear war. JFK refused, walk­ing out of the dis­cus­sion with the dis­gust­ed obser­va­tion that “We call our­selves the human race.”

In FTR #‘s 876,  926 and 1051, we exam­ined the cre­ation of the meme that Oswald had been net­work­ing with the Cubans and Sovi­ets in the run-up to the assas­si­na­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, Oswald was sup­pos­ed­ly meet­ing with Valery Kostikov, a KGB offi­cial in charge of assas­si­na­tions in the West­ern Hemi­sphere.

This cre­at­ed the pre­text for blam­ing JFK’s assas­si­na­tion on the Sovi­et Union and/or Cuba. There are indi­ca­tions that JFK’s assas­si­na­tion may well have been intend­ed as a pre­text for a nuclear first strike on the Sovi­et Union.

1.  “Bats, Gene Edit­ing and Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Exper­i­ments Raise Con­cerns Amid Coro­n­avirus Out­break” by Whit­ney Webb; The Last Amer­i­can Vagabond; 1/30/2020.

Whit­ney Webb has pro­vid­ed us with trou­bling insight into Pen­ta­gon research–some of which remains clas­si­fied:

  • Osten­si­bly aimed at pre­vent­ing pan­demics but–very possibly–masking prepa­ra­tions for offen­sive bio­log­i­cal war­fare projects. ” . . . . Many of these recent research projects are relat­ed to DARPA’s Pre­vent­ing Emerg­ing Path­o­gen­ic Threats, or PREEMPT pro­gram, which was offi­cial­ly announced in April 2018. PREEMPT focus­es specif­i­cal­ly on ani­mal reser­voirs of dis­ease, specif­i­cal­ly bats, and DARPA even not­ed in its press release in the pro­gram that it ‘is aware of biosafe­ty and biose­cu­ri­ty sen­si­tiv­i­ties that could arise’ due to the nature of the research. . . . In addi­tion, while both DARPA’s PREEMPT pro­gram and the Pentagon’s open inter­est in bats as bioweapons were announced in 2018, the U.S. mil­i­tary — specif­i­cal­ly the Depart­ment of Defense’s Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion Pro­gram — began fund­ing research involv­ing bats and dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing the coro­n­avirus­es MERS and SARS, a year pri­or in 2017. . . .”
  • Into the DNA of both Russ­ian and Chi­nese pop­u­la­tions. ” . . . . Since the Pen­ta­gon began ‘redesign­ing’ its poli­cies and research towards a ‘long war’ with Rus­sia and Chi­na, the Russ­ian mil­i­tary has accused the U.S. mil­i­tary of har­vest­ing DNA from Rus­sians as part of a covert bioweapon pro­gram, a charge that the Pen­ta­gon has adamant­ly denied. Major Gen­er­al Igor Kir­illov, the head of the Russ­ian military’s radi­a­tion, chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal pro­tec­tion unit who made these claims, also assert­ed that the U.S. was devel­op­ing such weapons in close prox­im­i­ty to Russ­ian and Chi­nese bor­ders. Chi­na has also accused the U.S. mil­i­tary of har­vest­ing DNA from Chi­nese cit­i­zens with ill inten­tions, such as when 200,000 Chi­nese farm­ers were used in 12 genet­ic exper­i­ments with­out informed con­sent. Those exper­i­ments had been con­duct­ed by Har­vard researchers as part of a U.S. gov­ern­ment-fund­ed project. . . .”
  • Into the appli­ca­tion of genet­ic engi­neer­ing in order to cre­ate eth­no-spe­cif­ic bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapons, as dis­cussed by the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry. ” . . . . In what is arguably the think tank’s most con­tro­ver­sial doc­u­ment, titled ‘Rebuild­ing America’s Defens­es,’ there are a few pas­sages that open­ly dis­cuss the util­i­ty of bioweapons, includ­ing the fol­low­ing sen­tences: ‘…com­bat like­ly will take place in new dimen­sions: in space, ‘cyber-space,’ and per­haps the world of microbes…advanced forms of bio­log­i­cal war­fare that can ‘tar­get’ spe­cif­ic geno­types may trans­form bio­log­i­cal war­fare from the realm of ter­ror to a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful tool.’ . . .”

2. “Mil­i­ta­rized Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence: Why Is The Pen­ta­gon Fund­ing The Eco­Health Alliance?” by Sam Hus­sei­ni; Coun­ter­punch; 12/21/2020.

  1. ” . . . . Metic­u­lous inves­ti­ga­tion of U.S. gov­ern­ment data­bas­es reveals that Pen­ta­gon fund­ing for the Eco­Health Alliance from 2013 to 2020, includ­ing con­tracts, grants and sub­con­tracts, was just under $39 mil­lion. Most, $34.6 mil­lion, was from the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruc­tion and impro­vised threat net­works.’. . .”

3. “Shi Zhengli: Weaponiz­ing Coro­n­avirus­es with Pen­ta­gon Fund­ing, at a Chi­nese Mil­i­tary Lab” by Alex­is Baden-May­er; Organ­ic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion; 09/24/2020.

  1. Fur­ther review of Shi’s research fund­ing from the Pen­ta­gon, via Eco­Health Alliance: ” . . . . Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months. . . .”
  2. More about mil­i­tary col­lab­o­ra­tion with Shi: ” . . . . In addi­tion to mil­i­tary fund­ing through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, Christo­pher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uni­formed Ser­vices Uni­ver­si­ty of the Health Sci­ences, Depart­ment of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy and Immunol­o­gy. . . .”
  3. A lengthy excerpt of this arti­cle is impor­tant to con­sid­er in this con­text: “. . . . A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der. To see how the first paper, ‘Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,’ is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty.

As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe. This was the sub­ject of a paper, ‘The Egypt­ian Rousette Genome Reveals Unex­pect­ed Fea­tures of Bat Antivi­ral Immu­ni­ty,’ that he pub­lished with mil­i­tary sci­en­tists and DTRA fund­ing.

‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.’

The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism. The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. . . .”

4. “Syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy rais­es risk of new bioweapons, US report warns” by Ian Sam­ple; The Guardian; 06/19/2018

. . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body.

Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sised. “The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,” said [Michael] Impe­ri­ale. “It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.”

Oth­er fair­ly sim­ple pro­ce­dures can be used to tweak the genes of dan­ger­ous bac­te­ria and make them resis­tant to antibi­otics, so that peo­ple infect­ed with them would be untreat­able. A more exot­ic bioweapon might come in the form of a genet­i­cal­ly-altered microbe that colonis­es the gut and churns out poi­sons. . . .

5. Doc­u­ments removed by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine–but archived by the Way­back Machine–confirm that the DTRA is among the sources of fund­ing for DOD-fund­ed labs in Ukraine. Note, too, the fact that many of these labs are “vet­eri­nary” labs. Vet­eri­nar­i­ans are high­ly-regard­ed for bio­log­i­cal war­fare recruit­ment, because they do not have to sign the Hip­po­crat­ic Oath.

One must ask the ques­tion, also, as to why the Embassy sud­den­ly removed these doc­u­ments?

web.archive.org/web/20170130193016/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20210511164310/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20210506053014/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170207122550/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170223011502/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170202040923/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170201004446/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20161230143004/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20210506212717/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170207153023/https://ph web.archive.org/web/20170211022339/https://ph

6. “What are Russia’s bio­log­i­cal weapons claims and what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing?” by Ed Pilk­ing­ton; The Guardian; 3/11/2022.

The UN secu­ri­ty coun­cil met on Fri­day to dis­cuss Moscow’s claims the US is fund­ing ‘mil­i­tary bio­log­i­cal activ­i­ties’ in Ukraine

The UN secu­ri­ty coun­cil met on Fri­day at Russia’s request to dis­cuss Moscow’s claims that the US is fund­ing “mil­i­tary bio­log­i­cal activ­i­ties” in Ukraine – in oth­er words, secret­ly devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons in Ukrain­ian lab­o­ra­to­ries. The event saw some heat­ed dis­cus­sion. The Russ­ian ambas­sador to the UN, Vasi­ly Neben­zya, evoked the ter­ri­fy­ing specter of an “uncon­trolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine” across Europe. His Amer­i­can coun­ter­part, Lin­da Thomas-Green­field, warned that Russia’s claim could be a pre­text for it launch­ing its own bio­log­i­cal weapons attack on Ukraine.

So what is the dis­pute all about, and what is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing inside Ukraine?

How did “bio labs” become the lat­est front in the Ukraine infor­ma­tion war?

Last Sun­day the Russ­ian min­istry of for­eign affairs post­ed a tweet accus­ing the US and Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ments of run­ning a secret “mil­i­tary-bio­log­i­cal pro­gramme” inside the strick­en coun­try. Moscow claimed that its invad­ing forces had dis­cov­ered evi­dence of an “emer­gency clean-up” to hide the pro­gramme.

Moscow went on to claim that it had found doc­u­ments relat­ed to the secret US oper­a­tion in lab­o­ra­to­ries in the Ukrain­ian cities of Kharkiv and Polta­va.

The alle­ga­tions were quick­ly ampli­fied by Chi­na, which sup­port­ed the claims dur­ing Friday’s UN secu­ri­ty coun­cil debate. . . .

. . . . How have the US and Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ments respond­ed? . . .

. . . . Ukraine’s ambas­sador to the world body, Sergiy Kys­lyt­sya, used more colour­ful lan­guage. He called the idea being advanced by Rus­sia “a bunch of insane delir­i­um”. . . .

So do bio labs exist inside Ukraine, and is the US sup­port­ing them?

Yes, and yes. Ukraine does oper­ate bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries which receive US fund­ing. The US under­sec­re­tary of state Vic­to­ria Nuland affirmed those facts in a Sen­ate for­eign rela­tions com­mit­tee hear­ing this week in which the Repub­li­can sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio asked her direct­ly whether Ukraine had bio­log­i­cal weapons.

Nuland did not answer the ques­tion head on. “Ukraine has bio­log­i­cal research facil­i­ties,” she replied, adding that there was con­cern that Russ­ian forces were try­ing to gain con­trol of the labs. “We are work­ing with the Ukraini­ans on how they can pre­vent any of those research mate­ri­als from falling into the hands of Russ­ian forces.” . . . .

. . . . The scheme was orig­i­nal­ly known as the Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion (CTR) pro­gramme, but is now more com­mon­ly referred to as the bio­log­i­cal engage­ment pro­gramme. It has been suc­cess­ful in sup­port­ing for­mer Sovi­et and oth­er coun­tries to ful­fil pub­lic health oblig­a­tions. . . .

. . . . Do the Ukraine lab­o­ra­to­ries store dan­ger­ous bio­log­i­cal agents?

Yes, it appears so. [!] As part of their work research­ing dis­eases the bio labs do seem to hold dan­ger­ous pathogens. We know that because WHO is urg­ing Ukraine to destroy any high­ly dan­ger­ous agents in its lab­o­ra­to­ries to avoid the risk of a dis­as­trous out­break should one of the labs be hit under Russ­ian attack. . .

“As part of this work, WHO has strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed to the min­istry of
health in Ukraine and oth­er respon­si­ble bod­ies to destroy high-threat
pathogens to pre­vent any poten­tial spills,” the UN health agency said.

The WHO has worked in Ukraine for sev­er­al years help­ing the bio labs improve their safe­ty and secu­ri­ty, so it knows what it is talk­ing about. . . .

7. “The­o­ry on U.S.-Funded Bioweapons Labs Is Base­less” by Lin­da Qiu; The New York Times; 3/12/2022.

. . . . Mr. Carl­son also point­ed to an inter­view with Robert Pope, the direc­tor of the Pentagon’s Coop­er­a­tive Threat Reduc­tion Pro­gram, which helps coun­tries in the for­mer Sovi­et Union secure or elim­i­nate nuclear and chem­i­cal weapons. (This pro­gram is a major fun­der of Eco­Health Alliance, as not­ed in FTR#1170.)

. . . . In con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny this week, Ms. Nuland, the under sec­re­tary of state for polit­i­cal affairs, was asked by Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio, Repub­li­can of Flori­da, whether Ukraine has chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal weapons.

“Ukraine has bio­log­i­cal research facil­i­ties which, in fact, we are now quite con­cerned Russ­ian troops, Russ­ian forces, may be seek­ing to gain con­trol of,” she respond­ed. “So we are work­ing with the Ukraini­ans on how they can pre­vent any of those research mate­ri­als from falling into the hands of Russ­ian forces should they approach.” . . .

. . . . The State Depart­ment said Ms. Nuland was refer­ring to Ukrain­ian diag­nos­tic and biode­fense lab­o­ra­to­ries dur­ing her tes­ti­mo­ny, which are dif­fer­ent from bio­log­i­cal weapons facil­i­ties. Rather, these biode­fense lab­o­ra­to­ries counter bio­log­i­cal threats through­out the coun­try, the depart­ment said. . . .

. . . . Mr. Pope had warned that Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine may dam­age lab­o­ra­to­ries in the coun­try that con­duct research and dis­ease sur­veil­lance and are sup­port­ed by the Unit­ed States. He not­ed that some of the facil­i­ties may con­tain pathogens once used for Sovi­et-era bioweapons pro­grams, but he empha­sized that the Ukrain­ian labs cur­rent­ly did not have the abil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture bioweapons. . . .

. . . . In a March inter­view with the Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s con­cerns about the lab­o­ra­to­ries falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specif­i­cal­ly about the Pentagon’s sup­port of 14 vet­eri­nary lab­o­ra­to­ries that pro­vide Ukraine with sam­pling and diag­nos­tic abil­i­ties to detect infec­tious dis­eases.

“Should Russ­ian forces occu­py a city with one of these facil­i­ties, we are con­cerned that Rus­sia will fab­ri­cate ‘evi­dence’ of nefar­i­ous activ­i­ty in an attempt to lend cred­i­bil­i­ty to their ongo­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion about these facil­i­ties,” he said.

The Unit­ed Nations Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil con­vened a meet­ing on Fri­day about Russia’s accu­sa­tions con­cern­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons in Ukraine. Izu­mi Nakamit­su, the U.N.’s high rep­re­sen­ta­tive for dis­ar­ma­ment affairs, said the Unit­ed Nations was “not aware of any bio­log­i­cal weapons pro­grams.” . . . .

Mod­ern Times: Cel­e­bra­tion of the 75th Anniver­sary of the 14th Waf­fen SS Divi­sion in Lviv, Ukraine in sum­mer of 2018. THIS is what lurks beneath the thin facade of Zelen­sky’s democ­ra­cy.

8. The West–in this case a high­ly-placed Colonel in the UK’s CBW establishment–are echo­ing the ver­biage about Russ­ian “false-flag” pos­si­bil­i­ties.

In light of the West­’s false flag oper­a­tions in the last ten years, that should alert us to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of Rus­sia being set up for a Ukraine/U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare flase-flag.

Note that Colonel Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don has “set the table” for “false-flag” chem­i­cal attacks in Syr­ia.

“PLAGUE WARS Putin could unleash dead­ly virus from seized Ukraine lab – and then blame the US, warns ex-Brit chem­i­cal weapons colonel” by Imo­gen Brad­dick; The Sun; 03/12/2022

RUSSIA could unleash a bioweapon on Ukraine more lethal than Covid from a Ukrain­ian lab, the for­mer head of the British Army’s chem­i­cal weapons unit has warned.

Fears are grow­ing Vladimir Putin could unleash a dead­ly plague as sci­en­tists in Ukraine have been told to destroy all “high-threat” lab dis­eases.

Colonel Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don, for­mer chief of the British Army’s chem­i­cal weapons unit, told The Sun Online there is a pos­si­bil­i­ty Russ­ian troops could storm a lab and use it as a base to unleash a bioweapon.

And he also warned that the “indis­crim­i­nate” bomb­ing by Putin’s troops could spark chaos at one of the labs.

It came as the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion said the most dead­ly pathogens in Ukraine’s labs should be wiped out as Russia’s relent­less bomb­ing has raised the risk of “poten­tial spills”.

The invad­ing Russ­ian forces have already proved to be reck­less enough to fire shells at Cher­nobyl, Europe’s largest nuclear-pow­er plant, and fire mis­siles at a radioac­tive-waste facil­i­ty near Kyiv. . . .

. . . . There are said to be more than 4,000 labs in Ukraine – and hun­dreds of these facil­i­ties work with “mod­er­ate-risk agents”.

Although Ukraine doesn’t have a lev­el-four lab – which han­dle the world’s most dan­ger­ous pathogens – two have clear­ance to work with high lev­el pathogens.

These lev­el-three labs typ­i­cal­ly work with coro­n­avirus­es, tuber­cu­lo­sis, yel­low fever, SARS, West Nile, and some strains of influen­za.

The main lab in Ukraine is under­stood to be the Ukrain­ian I. I. Mech­nikov Anti-Plague Research Insti­tute in Odessa which report­ed­ly works with “espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous” pathogens.

Anoth­er lev­el-three lab belongs to the Cen­tral San­i­tary Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal Sta­tion of the Min­istry of Health of Ukraine in Kyiv. . . .

. . . . “I think peo­ple are very con­cerned because they realise a virus can bring the world to its knees.”

Mr Bret­ton-Gor­don said Putin could unleash a bioweapon “more lethal than Covid”.

He warned: “If you splice Covid with some­thing like Ebo­la, then you have a mas­sive prob­lem.

“The Rus­sians could use a Ukrain­ian lab to release a bioweapon. . . .

9. The over­all theme of the pro­grams to be pre­sent­ed in this long series is cap­tured in an obser­va­tion made by Glenn Pinch­back.

Gen­er­al Walk­er and the Mur­der of Pres­i­dent Kennedy by Jef­frey H. Cau­field, M.D.; More­land Press [HC]; Copy­right 2015 Jef­frey H. Cau­field; ISBN-13: 978–0‑9915637–0‑8; pp. 86–87.

. . . . Gar­ri­son did not pro­vide an expla­na­tion for all of the [David Fer­rie] note’s sub­ject mat­ter. How­ev­er, he did know the mean­ing of “fly­ing Barag­o­na in the Beech.” “Beech” refers to the mod­el of Fer­rie’s air­plane, a Beechcraft. Barag­o­na was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . .

. . . . Gar­ri­son also obtained a tran­script of a let­ter writ­ten by Fer­rie to Barag­o­na. Next to Barag­o­na’s name, Gar­ri­son wrote: “Note Barag­o­na is impor­tant.” The let­ter had been sent to Gar­ri­son by Glenn Pinch­back, and a car­bon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a con­gress­man from Geor­gia. (Pinch­back worked in the Oper­a­tions Com­mand at Fort Sill, where he inter­cept­ed mail.) In the let­ter, Fer­rie shared his dream of the re-uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­many and liv­ing in a world where all the cur­ren­cy was in Deutschmarks. Pinch­back­’s sum­ma­tion of the let­ter described a “Neo-Nazi plot to enslave Amer­i­ca in the name of anti-Com­mu­nism,” and “a neo-Nazi plot gar­gan­tu­an in scope.” The Fer­rie let­ter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinch­back also report­ed­ly obtained a let­ter from David Fer­rie to Barag­o­na con­fess­ing his role in the assas­si­na­tion of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill sol­dier. . . .”

10. In 1961, the Joint Chiefs were push­ing for a first strike on the Sovi­et Union–a deci­sion to ini­ti­ate nuclear war. JFK refused, walk­ing out of the dis­cus­sion with the dis­gust­ed obser­va­tion that “We call our­selves the human race.”

In FTR #‘s 876,  926 and 1051, we exam­ined the cre­ation of the meme that Oswald had been net­work­ing with the Cubans and Sovi­ets in the run-up to the assas­si­na­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, Oswald was sup­pos­ed­ly meet­ing with Valery Kostikov, a KGB offi­cial in charge of assas­si­na­tions in the West­ern Hemi­sphere.

This cre­at­ed the pre­text for blam­ing JFK’s assas­si­na­tion on the Sovi­et Union and/or Cuba. There are indi­ca­tions that JFK’s assas­si­na­tion may well have been intend­ed as a pre­text for a nuclear first strike on the Sovi­et Union.

JFK and the Unspeak­able: Why He Died and Why It Mat­ters by James W. Dou­glass; Touch­stone Books [SC]; Copy­right 2008 by James W. Dou­glas; ISBN 978–1‑4391–9388‑4; pp. 235–237.

. . . . the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., were in fact press­ing their young com­man­der-in-chief, John F. Kennedy, to sup­port the strate­gic neces­si­ty of a first strike. They first did so in the sum­mer of 1961, in a Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil meet­ing whose sig­nif­i­cance remained deeply hid­den until the declas­si­fi­ca­tion of a top-secret doc­u­ment in 1994. Econ­o­mist James K. Gal­braith, the son of Kennedy’s friend and ambas­sador to India, John Ken­neth Gal­braith, co-authored an arti­cle that used the new­ly dis­closed doc­u­ment to expose the nuclear first-strike agen­da of Kennedy’s mil­i­tary chiefs.

At the July, 20, 1961, NSC meet­ing, Gen­er­al Hick­ey, chair­man of the “Net Eval­u­a­tion Sub­com­mit­tee” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pre­sent­ed a plan for nuclear sur­prise attack on the Sovi­et Union “in late 1963, pre­ced­ed by a peri­od of height­ened ten­sions.” Oth­er pre­sen­ters of the pre­emp­tive strike plan includ­ed Gen­er­al Lyman Lem­nitzer, Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA direc­tor Allen Dulles. . . .

. . . . Pres­i­dent Kennedy raised a series of ques­tions in response to the first-strike pre­sen­ta­tion he heard. He asked about a pre­emp­tive attack’s like­ly dam­age to the U.S.S.R., its impact if launched in 1962, and how long U.S. cit­i­zens would have to remain in fall­out shel­ters fol­low­ing such an attack. . . .

. . . . While the Bur­ris mem­o­ran­dum is valu­able in its rev­e­la­tion of the first-strike agen­da, it does not men­tion Kennedy’s ulti­mate dis­gust with the entire process. We know that fact first from its dis­clo­sure in an oral his­to­ry by Roswell Gilpatric, JFK’s Deputy Sec­re­tary of Defense. Gilpatric described the meeting’s abrupt con­clu­sion: “Final­ly, Kennedy got up and walked right out in the mid­dle of it, and that was the end of it.” . . . .

. . . . His walk­out could not have pleased his mil­i­tary and CIA chiefs. . . .

 

Discussion

3 comments for “FTR#1235 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lie?, Part 8”

  1. Will for­mal­ly drop­ping Ukraine’s NATO ambi­tions be the cat­a­lyst that kick starts talks between Ukraine and Rus­sia? Let’s hope so, because we’re get­ting reports that Ukraine’s Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky would con­sid­er offi­cial­ly drop­ping Ukraine’s bid for NATO mem­ber­ship in exchange for a cease-fire and the with­draw­al of Russ­ian troops. It’s the lat­est reminder that NATO still has­n’t for­mal­ly giv­en Ukraine a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer on whether or not the coun­try can even­tu­al­ly join NATO. It’s also a reminder that Ukraine for­mal­ly adopt­ed its NATO ambi­tions in its con­sti­tu­tion with a 2019 con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment.

    How will the West advise Zelen­sky on whether or not to hold out on drop­ping the NATO mem­ber­ship ambi­tions? That’s one of the big imme­di­ate ques­tions. The kind of ques­tion that should give us a bet­ter idea on just how intent the West is on turn­ing Ukraine into a new Afghanistan. So with that grim ques­tion in mind, here’s a recent Bloomberg opin­ion piece by Niall Fer­gu­son that reminds us of anoth­er poten­tial­ly sig­nif­i­cant dynam­ic shap­ing these peace talks: the fact that this con­flict in Ukraine isn’t just seen as a proxy con­flict in a New Cold War between the West and Rus­sia. It’s seen by many in nation­al secu­ri­ty cir­cles as a proxy con­flict in a much large New Cold War between the West on one side and Rus­sia and Chi­na on the oth­er side, with regime change in Rus­sia being just the first step in this broad­er con­flict. That’s the impres­sion Fer­gu­son is get­ting when speak­ing with his nation­al secu­ri­ty con­tacts. So if that impres­sion is accu­rate, it’s going to be cru­cial for Zelen­sky to keep in mind that ham­mer­ing out a peace treaty with Rus­sia might have to be a nego­ti­a­tion between Ukraine and Rus­sia alone, because the oth­er inter­est­ed par­ties are inter­est­ed in a much big­ger and longer fight:

    Bloomberg
    Opin­ion

    Putin Mis­un­der­stands His­to­ry. So, Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Does the U.S.

    Biden is mak­ing a colos­sal mis­take in think­ing he can bleed Rus­sia dry, top­ple Putin and sig­nal to Chi­na to keep its hands off Tai­wan.

    By Niall Fer­gu­son
    March 22, 2022, 1:00 AM CDT

    “The lan­guage peo­ple speak in the cor­ri­dors of pow­er,” for­mer Sec­re­tary of Defense Ash­ton Carter once observed, “is not eco­nom­ics or pol­i­tics. It is his­to­ry.”

    In a recent aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle, I showed how true this was after both the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks of 2001 and the “9/15” bank­rupt­cy of Lehman Broth­ers in 2008. Pol­i­cy mak­ers used all kinds of his­tor­i­cal analo­gies as they react­ed. “The Pearl Har­bor of the 21st cen­tu­ry took place today,” Pres­i­dent George W. Bush not­ed in his diary, late on the night of the attacks, to give just one exam­ple, though many oth­er par­al­lels were drawn in the suc­ceed­ing days, from the Civ­il War to the Cold War.

    Sev­en years lat­er, Fed­er­al Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and New York Fed Pres­i­dent Tim Gei­th­n­er were the first mem­bers of the Fed­er­al Open Mar­ket Com­mit­tee to appre­ci­ate that, with­out dras­tic mea­sures, they risked re-run­ning the Great Depres­sion.

    What kind of his­to­ry is inform­ing today’s deci­sions in Wash­ing­ton as the war in Ukraine nears the con­clu­sion of its first month? A few clues have emerged.

    “Amer­i­can offi­cials are divid­ed on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars, like the Sovi­et Union’s war in Afghanistan, can be applied to the ongo­ing war in Ukraine,” David Sanger report­ed for the New York Times on Sat­ur­day.

    Accord­ing to Sanger, who can­not have writ­ten his piece with­out high-lev­el sources, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion “seeks to help Ukraine lock Rus­sia in a quag­mire with­out incit­ing a broad­er con­flict with a nuclear-armed adver­sary or cut­ting off poten­tial paths to de-esca­la­tion … CIA offi­cers are help­ing to ensure that crates of weapons are deliv­ered into the hands of vet­ted Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary units, accord­ing to Amer­i­can offi­cials. But as of now, Mr. Biden and his staff do not see the util­i­ty of an expan­sive covert effort to use the spy agency to fer­ry in arms as the Unit­ed States did in Afghanistan against the Sovi­et Union dur­ing the 1980s.”

    Read­ing this care­ful­ly, I con­clude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The admin­is­tra­tion will con­tin­ue to sup­ply the Ukraini­ans with anti-air­craft Stingers, anti­tank Javelins and explo­sive Switch­blade drones. It will keep try­ing to per­suade oth­er North Atlantic Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion gov­ern­ments to sup­ply heav­ier defen­sive weapon­ry. (The lat­est U.S. pro­pos­al is for Turkey to pro­vide Ukraine with the sophis­ti­cat­ed S‑400 anti-air­craft sys­tem, which Ankara pur­chased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scut­tled plan for Pol­ish MiG fight­ers.) Wash­ing­ton will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 play­book of sup­ply­ing an insur­gency only if the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment los­es the con­ven­tion­al war.

    I have evi­dence from oth­er sources to cor­rob­o­rate this. “The only end game now,” a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial was heard to say at a pri­vate event ear­li­er this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Rus­sia] will be a pari­ah state that will nev­er be wel­comed back into the com­mu­ni­ty of nations. Chi­na has made a huge error in think­ing Putin will get away with it. See­ing Rus­sia get cut off will not look like a good vec­tor and they’ll have to re-eval­u­ate the Sino-Rus­sia axis. All this is to say that democ­ra­cy and the West may well look back on this as a piv­otal strength­en­ing moment.”

    I gath­er that senior British fig­ures are talk­ing in sim­i­lar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the con­flict to be extend­ed and there­by bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such lan­guage. It helps explain, among oth­er things, the lack of any diplo­mat­ic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readi­ness of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to call Putin a war crim­i­nal.

    Now, I may be too pes­simistic. I would very much like to share Fran­cis Fukuyama’s opti­mism that “Rus­sia is head­ing for an out­right defeat in Ukraine.” Here is his bold pre­dic­tion from March 10 (also here):

    The col­lapse of their posi­tion could be sud­den and cat­a­stroph­ic, rather than hap­pen­ing slow­ly through a war of attri­tion. The army in the field will reach a point where it can nei­ther be sup­plied nor with­drawn, and morale will vapor­ize. … Putin will not sur­vive the defeat of his army … A Russ­ian defeat will make pos­si­ble a “new birth of free­dom,” and get us out of our funk about the declin­ing state of glob­al democ­ra­cy. The spir­it of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukraini­ans.

    From his lap­top to God’s ears.

    I can see why so many West­ern observers attach a high prob­a­bil­i­ty to this sce­nario. There is no ques­tion that the Russ­ian inva­sion force has sus­tained very high casu­al­ties and loss­es of equip­ment. Incred­i­bly, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da, a pro-Krem­lin Russ­ian news­pa­per, just pub­lished Russ­ian Min­istry of Defense num­bers indi­cat­ing 9,861 Russ­ian sol­diers killed in Ukraine and 16,153 wound­ed. (The sto­ry was quick­ly removed.) By com­par­i­son, 15,000 Sovi­et troops died and 35,000 were wound­ed in 10 years in Afghanistan.

    More­over, there is ample evi­dence that their logis­tics is a mess, exem­pli­fied by the many sup­ply trucks that have sim­ply been aban­doned because their tires or engines gave out. By these mea­sures, Ukraine does seem to be win­ning the war, as Phillips O’Brien and Eliot A. Cohen have argued. His­to­ry also pro­vides numer­ous cas­es of author­i­tar­i­an regimes that fell apart quite rapid­ly in the face of mil­i­tary revers­es — think of the fates of Sad­dam Hus­sein and Moam­mar Al Qaddafi, or the Argen­tine jun­ta that invad­ed the Falk­lands almost exact­ly 40 years ago.

    It would indeed be won­der­ful if the com­bi­na­tion of attri­tion in Ukraine and a sanc­tions-induced finan­cial cri­sis at home led to Putin’s down­fall. Take that, Chi­na! Just you try the same trick with Tai­wan — which, by the way, we care about a lot more than Ukraine because of all those amaz­ing semi­con­duc­tors they make at Tai­wan Semi­con­duc­tor Man­u­fac­tur­ing Co.

    The fas­ci­nat­ing thing about this strat­e­gy is the way it com­bines cyn­i­cism and opti­mism. It is, when you come to think of it, arche­typ­al Realpoli­tik to allow the car­nage in Ukraine to con­tin­ue; to sit back and watch the hero­ic Ukraini­ans “bleed Rus­sia dry”; to think of the con­flict as a mere sub-plot in Cold War II, a strug­gle in which Chi­na is our real oppo­nent.

    The Biden admin­is­tra­tion not only thinks it’s doing enough to sus­tain the Ukrain­ian war effort, but not so much as to pro­voke Putin to esca­la­tion. It also thinks it’s doing enough to sat­is­fy pub­lic opin­ion, which has ral­lied strong­ly behind Ukraine, but not so much as to cost Amer­i­can lives, aside from a few unlucky vol­un­teers and jour­nal­ists.

    The opti­mism, how­ev­er, is the assump­tion that allow­ing the war to keep going will nec­es­sar­i­ly under­mine Putin’s posi­tion; and that his humil­i­a­tion in turn will serve as a deter­rent to Chi­na. I fear these assump­tions may be bad­ly wrong and reflect a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the rel­e­vant his­to­ry.

    Pro­long­ing the war runs the risk not just of leav­ing tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans dead and mil­lions home­less, but also of hand­ing Putin some­thing that he can plau­si­bly present at home as vic­to­ry. Bet­ting on a Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion is bet­ting on an exceed­ing­ly rare event, even if the war con­tin­ues to go bad­ly for Putin; if the war turns in his favor, there will be no palace coup.

    As for Chi­na, I believe the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is deeply mis­guid­ed in think­ing that its threats of sec­ondary sanc­tions against Chi­nese com­pa­nies will deter Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping from pro­vid­ing eco­nom­ic assis­tance to Rus­sia.

    Begin with the mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion, which West­ern ana­lysts con­sis­tent­ly present in too favor­able a light for the Ukraini­ans. As I write, it is true that the Rus­sians seem to have put on hold their planned encir­clement of Kyiv, though fight­ing con­tin­ues on the out­skirts of the city. But the the­aters of war to watch are in the east and the south.

    In the east, accord­ing to mil­i­tary experts whom I trust, there is a sig­nif­i­cant risk that the Ukrain­ian posi­tions near the Don­bas will come under seri­ous threat in the com­ing weeks. In the south, a bat­tal­ion-sized Chechen force is clos­ing in on the besieged and 80%-destroyed city of Mar­i­upol. The Ukrain­ian defend­ers lack resup­ply out­lets and room for tac­ti­cal break­out. In short, the fall of Mar­i­upol may be just days away. That in turn will free up Russ­ian forces to com­plete the envel­op­ment of the Don­bas front.

    The next major tar­gets in the south lie fur­ther west: Myko­layiv, which is inland, north­west of Kher­son, and then the real prize, the his­toric port city of Ode­sa. It doesn’t help the defend­ers that a large storm in the north­ern Black Sea on Fri­day did con­sid­er­able dam­age to Ukrain­ian sea defens­es by dis­lodg­ing mines.

    Also on Fri­day, the Rus­sians claim, they used a hyper­son­ic weapon in com­bat for the first time: a Kinzhal air-launched mis­sile which was used to take out an under­ground muni­tions depot at Deli­atyn in west­ern Ukraine. They could have achieved the same result with a con­ven­tion­al cruise mis­sile. The point was pre­sum­ably to remind Ukraine’s back­ers of the vast­ly supe­ri­or fire­pow­er Rus­sia has at its dis­pos­al. Thus far, around 1,100 mis­siles have struck Ukraine. There are plen­ty more where they came from.

    And, of course, Putin has the pow­er — unlike Sad­dam or Qaddafi — to threat­en to use nuclear weapons, though I don’t believe he needs to do more than make threats, giv­en that the con­ven­tion­al war is like­ly to turn in his favor. The next blow will be when Belaru­sian forces invade west­ern Ukraine from the north, which the Ukrain­ian gen­er­al staff expects to hap­pen in the com­ing days, and which could pose a threat to the sup­ply of arms from Poland.

    ...

    I fail to see in cur­rent West­ern strate­giz­ing any real recog­ni­tion of how bad­ly this war could go for Ukraine in the com­ing weeks. The incen­tive for Putin is obvi­ous­ly to cre­ate for him­self a stronger bar­gain­ing posi­tion than he cur­rent­ly has before enter­ing into seri­ous nego­ti­a­tions. The Ukraini­ans have shown their cards. They are ready to drop the idea of NATO mem­ber­ship; to accept neu­tral­i­ty; to seek secu­ri­ty guar­an­tees from third par­ties; to accept lim­its on their own mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ty.

    What is less clear is where they stand on the future sta­tus of Crimea and the sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent republics of Donet­sk and Luhan­sk. It seems obvi­ous that Putin needs more than just these to be able to claim cred­i­bly to have won his war. It seems equal­ly obvi­ous that, if they believe they are win­ning, the Ukraini­ans will not yield a square mile of ter­ri­to­ry. Con­trol of the Black Sea coast would give Putin the basis from which to demand fur­ther con­ces­sions, notably a “land bridge” from Crimea to Rus­sia.

    Mean­while, the main­ly finan­cial sanc­tions imposed on Rus­sia are doing their intend­ed work, in caus­ing some­thing like a nation­wide bank run and con­sumer goods short­ages. Esti­mates vary as to the scale of the eco­nom­ic con­trac­tion — per­haps as much as a third, recall­ing the depres­sion con­di­tions that fol­lowed the Sovi­et col­lapse in 1991.

    Yet, so long as Euro­pean Union coun­tries refuse to impose an ener­gy embar­go on Rus­sia, Putin’s regime con­tin­ues to receive around $1.1 bil­lion a day from the EU in oil and gas receipts. I remain skep­ti­cal that the sanc­tions as present­ly con­sti­tut­ed can either halt the Russ­ian war machine or top­ple Putin. Why has the ruble not fall­en fur­ther and even ral­lied against the euro last week?

    ...

    I dis­agree with the for­mer Russ­ian for­eign min­is­ter, Andrey Kozyrev, who told the Finan­cial Times that, for Putin and his cronies, “the cold war nev­er stopped.” That is not the his­to­ry that inter­ests Putin. As the Bul­gar­i­an polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Ivan Krastev told Der Spiegel, Putin “expressed out­rage that the annex­a­tion of the Crimea had been com­pared with Hitler’s annex­a­tion of the Sude­ten­land in 1938. Putin lives in his­toric analo­gies and metaphors. Those who are ene­mies of eter­nal Rus­sia must be Nazis.” More­over:

    The hypocrisy of the West has become an obses­sion of his, and it is reflect­ed in every­thing the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment does. Did you know that in parts of his dec­la­ra­tion on the annex­a­tion of Crimea, he took pas­sages almost ver­ba­tim from the Koso­vo dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence, which was sup­port­ed by the West? Or that the attack on Kyiv began with the destruc­tion of the tele­vi­sion tow­er just as NATO attacked the tele­vi­sion tow­er in Bel­grade in 1999?

    Yet such recent his­to­ry is less sig­nif­i­cant to Putin than the much old­er his­to­ry of Russia’s impe­r­i­al past. I have made this argu­ment here before. Fresh evi­dence that Putin’s project is not the res­ur­rec­tion of the Sovi­et Union, but looks back to tsarist impe­ri­al­ism and Ortho­doxy, was pro­vid­ed by his speech at the fascis­tic ral­ly held on Fri­day at Moscow’s main foot­ball sta­di­um. Its con­clud­ing allu­sion to the tsarist admi­ral Fyo­dor Ushakov, who made his rep­u­ta­tion by win­ning vic­to­ries in the Black Sea, struck me as omi­nous for Ode­sa.

    The Chi­nese also know how to apply his­to­ry to con­tem­po­rary prob­lems, but they do it in a dif­fer­ent way again. While Putin wants to trans­port post-Sovi­et Rus­sia back into a mythol­o­gized tsarist past, Xi remains the heir to Mao Zedong, and one who aspires to a place along­side him in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s pan­theon. In their two-hour call on Fri­day, accord­ing to the Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry read-out, Biden told Xi:

    50 years ago, the US and Chi­na made the impor­tant choice of issu­ing the Shang­hai Com­mu­nique. Fifty years on, the US-Chi­na rela­tion­ship has once again come to a crit­i­cal time. How this rela­tion­ship devel­ops will shape the world in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Biden reit­er­at­ed that the US does not seek a new Cold War with Chi­na; it does not aim to change China’s sys­tem; the revi­tal­iza­tion of its alliances is not tar­get­ed at Chi­na; the US does not sup­port “Tai­wan inde­pen­dence”; and it has no inten­tion to seek a con­flict with Chi­na.

    To judge by Xi’s response, he believes not one word of Biden’s assur­ances. As he replied:

    The Chi­na-US rela­tion­ship, instead of get­ting out of the predica­ment cre­at­ed by the pre­vi­ous US admin­is­tra­tion, has encoun­tered a grow­ing num­ber of chal­lenges. …

    In par­tic­u­lar … some peo­ple in the US have sent a wrong sig­nal to “Tai­wan inde­pen­dence” forces. This is very dan­ger­ous. Mis­han­dling of the Tai­wan ques­tion will have a dis­rup­tive impact on the bilat­er­al ties … The direct cause for the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Chi­na-US rela­tion­ship is that some peo­ple on the US side have not fol­lowed through on the impor­tant com­mon under­stand­ing reached by the two Pres­i­dents …

    Xi con­clud­ed with a Chi­nese say­ing: “He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.” Make of that what you will, but it didn’t strike me as very encour­ag­ing to those in Team Biden who have been push­ing a hawk­ish line toward Chi­na.

    The Chi­na hawks in the admin­is­tra­tion — notably Kurt Camp­bell and Rush Doshi at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil — do not like the term “Cold War II.” But Doshi’s recent book “The Long Game” (which I reviewed here) is essen­tial­ly a man­u­al for the con­tain­ment of Chi­na — the near­est thing we are like­ly to get to George Kennan’s foun­da­tion­al Long Telegram and “X” arti­cle in For­eign Affairs.

    And Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor Jake Sul­li­van did not make him­self pop­u­lar at last Monday’s marathon meet­ing with his Chi­nese coun­ter­part, Yang Jiechi, by threat­en­ing sec­ondary sanc­tions against a list of Chi­nese com­pa­nies the U.S. will be watch­ing for signs that they are trad­ing with Rus­sia. If Benn Steill and Ben­jamin Del­la Roc­ca of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions are right, the Chi­nese have already helped Rus­sia hide some of its for­eign exchange reserves from finan­cial sanc­tions.

    Judg­ing by his week­end inter­view in the Wall Street Jour­nal, a mem­ber of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s NSC, Matthew Pot­tinger, is now more than con­tent to call a cold war by its real name. I agree: The inva­sion of Ukraine in many ways resem­bles the inva­sion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950.

    I would put it like this: Cold War II is like a strange mir­ror-image of Cold War I. In the First Cold War, the senior part­ner was Rus­sia, the junior part­ner was Chi­na — now the roles are reversed. In Cold War I, the first hot war was in Asia (Korea) — now it’s in Europe (Ukraine). In Cold War I, Korea was just the first of many con­fronta­tions with aggres­sive Sovi­et-backed prox­ies — today the cri­sis in Ukraine will like­ly be fol­lowed by crises in the Mid­dle East (Iran) and Far East (Tai­wan).

    But there’s one very strik­ing con­trast. In Cold War I, Pres­i­dent Har­ry Truman’s admin­is­tra­tion was able to lead an inter­na­tion­al coali­tion with a Unit­ed Nations man­date to defend South Korea; now Ukraine has to make do with just arms sup­plies. And the rea­son for that, as we have seen, is the Biden administration’s intense fear that Putin may esca­late to nuclear war if U.S. sup­port for Ukraine goes too far.

    That wasn’t a con­cern in 1950. Although the Sovi­ets con­duct­ed their first atom­ic test on August 29, 1949, less than a year before the out­break of the Kore­an War, they were in no way ready to retal­i­ate if (as Gen­er­al Dou­glas MacArthur rec­om­mend­ed) the U.S. had used atom­ic bombs to win the Kore­an War.

    His­to­ry talks in the cor­ri­dors of pow­er. But it speaks in dif­fer­ent voic­es, accord­ing to where the cor­ri­dors are locat­ed. In my view — and I real­ly would love to be wrong about this — the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is mak­ing a colos­sal mis­take in think­ing that it can pro­tract the war in Ukraine, bleed Rus­sia dry, top­ple Putin and sig­nal to Chi­na to keep its hands off Tai­wan.

    ————-

    “Putin Mis­un­der­stands His­to­ry. So, Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Does the U.S.” by Niall Fer­gu­son; Bloomberg; 03/22/2022

    “The fas­ci­nat­ing thing about this strat­e­gy is the way it com­bines cyn­i­cism and opti­mism. It is, when you come to think of it, arche­typ­al Realpoli­tik to allow the car­nage in Ukraine to con­tin­ue; to sit back and watch the hero­ic Ukraini­ans “bleed Rus­sia dry”; to think of the con­flict as a mere sub-plot in Cold War II, a strug­gle in which Chi­na is our real oppo­nent.”

    The West is clear­ly view­ing this con­flict as part of a larg­er regime change oper­a­tion in Rus­sia. But how much is this Russ­ian regime-change agen­da being viewed as just an ear­ly phase in a larg­er longer-term con­fronta­tion with Chi­na? These are some of the ques­tions raised by Niall Fer­gu­son’s piece, which appears to be based in part on Fer­gu­son’s dis­cus­sions with peo­ple in the both US and UK gov­ern­ments. As for­mer Trump NSC mem­ber — and Chi­na-hawk — Math­ew Pot­tinger described it, the inva­sion of Ukraine is the start of a new Cold War. A new Cold War with the West on one side and Rus­sia and Chi­na on the oth­er side:

    ...
    What kind of his­to­ry is inform­ing today’s deci­sions in Wash­ing­ton as the war in Ukraine nears the con­clu­sion of its first month? A few clues have emerged.

    “Amer­i­can offi­cials are divid­ed on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars, like the Sovi­et Union’s war in Afghanistan, can be applied to the ongo­ing war in Ukraine,” David Sanger report­ed for the New York Times on Sat­ur­day.

    Accord­ing to Sanger, who can­not have writ­ten his piece with­out high-lev­el sources, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion “seeks to help Ukraine lock Rus­sia in a quag­mire with­out incit­ing a broad­er con­flict with a nuclear-armed adver­sary or cut­ting off poten­tial paths to de-esca­la­tion … CIA offi­cers are help­ing to ensure that crates of weapons are deliv­ered into the hands of vet­ted Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary units, accord­ing to Amer­i­can offi­cials. But as of now, Mr. Biden and his staff do not see the util­i­ty of an expan­sive covert effort to use the spy agency to fer­ry in arms as the Unit­ed States did in Afghanistan against the Sovi­et Union dur­ing the 1980s.”

    Read­ing this care­ful­ly, I con­clude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The admin­is­tra­tion will con­tin­ue to sup­ply the Ukraini­ans with anti-air­craft Stingers, anti­tank Javelins and explo­sive Switch­blade drones. It will keep try­ing to per­suade oth­er North Atlantic Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion gov­ern­ments to sup­ply heav­ier defen­sive weapon­ry. (The lat­est U.S. pro­pos­al is for Turkey to pro­vide Ukraine with the sophis­ti­cat­ed S‑400 anti-air­craft sys­tem, which Ankara pur­chased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scut­tled plan for Pol­ish MiG fight­ers.) Wash­ing­ton will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 play­book of sup­ply­ing an insur­gency only if the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment los­es the con­ven­tion­al war.

    I have evi­dence from oth­er sources to cor­rob­o­rate this. “The only end game now,” a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial was heard to say at a pri­vate event ear­li­er this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Rus­sia] will be a pari­ah state that will nev­er be wel­comed back into the com­mu­ni­ty of nations. Chi­na has made a huge error in think­ing Putin will get away with it. See­ing Rus­sia get cut off will not look like a good vec­tor and they’ll have to re-eval­u­ate the Sino-Rus­sia axis. All this is to say that democ­ra­cy and the West may well look back on this as a piv­otal strength­en­ing moment.”

    I gath­er that senior British fig­ures are talk­ing in sim­i­lar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the con­flict to be extend­ed and there­by bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such lan­guage. It helps explain, among oth­er things, the lack of any diplo­mat­ic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readi­ness of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to call Putin a war crim­i­nal.

    ...

    Judg­ing by his week­end inter­view in the Wall Street Jour­nal, a mem­ber of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s NSC, Matthew Pot­tinger, is now more than con­tent to call a cold war by its real name. I agree: The inva­sion of Ukraine in many ways resem­bles the inva­sion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950.

    I would put it like this: Cold War II is like a strange mir­ror-image of Cold War I. In the First Cold War, the senior part­ner was Rus­sia, the junior part­ner was Chi­na — now the roles are reversed. In Cold War I, the first hot war was in Asia (Korea) — now it’s in Europe (Ukraine). In Cold War I, Korea was just the first of many con­fronta­tions with aggres­sive Sovi­et-backed prox­ies — today the cri­sis in Ukraine will like­ly be fol­lowed by crises in the Mid­dle East (Iran) and Far East (Tai­wan).
    ...

    As dark as it is to think of the war in Ukraine is a cyn­i­cal strat­e­gy to bleed Rus­sia, it’s far dark­er to treat the war in Ukraine as just a proxy war in a much larg­er and longer-term New Cold War against Rus­sia and Chi­na. It’s an even big­ger excuse to treat Ukraine like a blunt instru­ment. And yet that’s the kind of strate­giz­ing that’s like­ly tak­ing place in cap­i­tals across the West right now. And why we should­n’t be sur­prised if it sup­port for con­tin­u­ing the con­flict — and eschew­ing peace talks — remains the go-to advice from the West even if things go awry from Ukraine on the bat­tle­field. The plan isn’t for Ukraine to win the con­flict. It’s for Ukraine to inflict as much dam­age to Putin gov­ern­ment as pos­si­ble in antic­i­pa­tion of a larg­er con­flict with Chi­na down the line. That’s part of what is going to make the West­’s advice to Ukraine on Russ­ian demands that Ukraine elim­i­nate its NATO ambi­tions a key fac­tor to watch in terms of assess­ing whether or not Ukraine is going to be treat­ed like a proxy punch­ing bag:

    ...
    The Biden admin­is­tra­tion not only thinks it’s doing enough to sus­tain the Ukrain­ian war effort, but not so much as to pro­voke Putin to esca­la­tion. It also thinks it’s doing enough to sat­is­fy pub­lic opin­ion, which has ral­lied strong­ly behind Ukraine, but not so much as to cost Amer­i­can lives, aside from a few unlucky vol­un­teers and jour­nal­ists.

    The opti­mism, how­ev­er, is the assump­tion that allow­ing the war to keep going will nec­es­sar­i­ly under­mine Putin’s posi­tion; and that his humil­i­a­tion in turn will serve as a deter­rent to Chi­na. I fear these assump­tions may be bad­ly wrong and reflect a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the rel­e­vant his­to­ry.

    Pro­long­ing the war runs the risk not just of leav­ing tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans dead and mil­lions home­less, but also of hand­ing Putin some­thing that he can plau­si­bly present at home as vic­to­ry. Bet­ting on a Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion is bet­ting on an exceed­ing­ly rare event, even if the war con­tin­ues to go bad­ly for Putin; if the war turns in his favor, there will be no palace coup.

    ...

    I fail to see in cur­rent West­ern strate­giz­ing any real recog­ni­tion of how bad­ly this war could go for Ukraine in the com­ing weeks. The incen­tive for Putin is obvi­ous­ly to cre­ate for him­self a stronger bar­gain­ing posi­tion than he cur­rent­ly has before enter­ing into seri­ous nego­ti­a­tions. The Ukraini­ans have shown their cards. They are ready to drop the idea of NATO mem­ber­ship; to accept neu­tral­i­ty; to seek secu­ri­ty guar­an­tees from third par­ties; to accept lim­its on their own mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ty.
    ...

    Will a big bloody war be Putin’s down­fall? That’s the bet West­ern pol­i­cy-mak­ers are engag­ing in. A gam­ble that isn’t sim­ply a bet that Putin will be replaced, but replaced by a pro-West­ern gov­ern­ment. Or per­haps Rus­sia descends into civ­il war and is bro­ken up. These are the kinds of ‘good’ sce­nar­ios West­ern plan­ners are eager­ly hop­ing to bring about. But how about a neo-fas­cist Russ­ian gov­ern­ment? How much of a risk of a ‘worse than Putin’ sce­nario are pol­i­cy-mak­ers will­ing to risk in their bid to top­ple Putin? We’ll find out. But to get an idea of how much NATO mem­ber­ship has been dan­gled in front of Ukraine, exac­er­bat­ing the under­ly­ing ten­sions between Rus­sia and Ukraine, here’s an arti­cle from June of 2021, with Zelenksy open­ly call­ing on NATO to just give some sort ‘yes’ or ‘no’ clar­i­ty to Ukraine as the mil­i­tary ten­sions with Rus­sia were build­ing and the risk of open con­flict in the Don­bas was grow­ing. That clar­i­ty obvi­ous­ly nev­er arrived:

    Reuters

    Zelen­skiy to Biden: give us clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on Ukraine NATO path

    By Pavel Poli­tyuk
    June 14, 2021 7:40 PM UTC Updat­ed

    KYIV, June 14 (Reuters) — Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skiy said on Mon­day he wants a clear “yes” or “no” from U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden on giv­ing Ukraine a plan to join the NATO mil­i­tary alliance.

    In a joint inter­view with Reuters, the Asso­ci­at­ed Press and Agence France-Press, Zelen­skiy said he received assur­ances that Biden would not use Ukraine as a bar­gain­ing tool in his meet­ing with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin this week.

    He called on the Unit­ed States to pro­vide eco­nom­ic sup­port to Ukraine and urged both Biden and the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to be under­stand­ing of Ukraine’s prob­lems before plac­ing “unfair” reform demands on his pres­i­den­cy.

    “If we are talk­ing about NATO and the MAP, I would real­ly like to get (from Biden) specifics — yes or no,” Zelen­skiy said, refer­ring to the Mem­ber­ship Action Plan giv­en to can­di­date coun­tries, a sta­tus which Ukraine has long sought. “We must get clear dates and the like­li­hood of this for Ukraine.”

    He was speak­ing on the same day as NATO mem­bers met for a one-day sum­mit in Brus­sels. Ukraine has expressed dis­ap­point­ment in not being invit­ed to the meet­ing.

    Zelen­skiy has urged NATO mem­bers to accel­er­ate Ukraine’s entry into the alliance after a stand­off with Rus­sia this year that saw Rus­sia mass addi­tion­al troops and mil­i­tary equip­ment near Ukraine’s bor­ders.

    Zelen­skiy said most of Rus­si­a’s troops had yet to with­draw, and that Rus­sia was drag­ging its feet on facil­i­tat­ing a meet­ing with Putin for no clear rea­son. About 11,000 troops had left and 95,000 remained, he esti­mat­ed.

    ...

    ‘BE MORE FLEXIBLE’

    Zelen­skiy said Ukraine had done every­thing nec­es­sary to earn a NATO mem­ber­ship plan, which Ukraine sees as a vital deter­rent against Rus­sia but Moscow fierce­ly oppos­es.

    “Every day we prove that we are ready to be in the alliance more than most of the coun­tries of the Euro­pean Union,” he said.

    He expects Ukraine to secure a much-delayed IMF tranche by the autumn though added Ukraine could still “live nor­mal­ly” with­out one.

    Zelen­skiy did not rule out anoth­er flare-up in the com­ing months in Ukraine’s con­flict with Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists, though in his assess­ment Rus­sia was not look­ing to pro­voke a “full-scale war”. Kyiv says the con­flict in east­ern Ukraine has killed 14,000 peo­ple since 2014.

    “Every­one should under­stand and be more flex­i­ble, under­stand that we are at war, that we are defend­ing democ­ra­cy in Europe and defend­ing our coun­try, and there­fore you can­not just talk to us with phras­es about reforms,” he said.

    ———–

    “Zelen­skiy to Biden: give us clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on Ukraine NATO path” by Pavel Poli­tyuk; Reuters; 06/14/2021

    ““If we are talk­ing about NATO and the MAP, I would real­ly like to get (from Biden) specifics — yes or no,” Zelen­skiy said, refer­ring to the Mem­ber­ship Action Plan giv­en to can­di­date coun­tries, a sta­tus which Ukraine has long sought. “We must get clear dates and the like­li­hood of this for Ukraine.””

    Yes or no. A lit­tle clar­i­ty please! That was the very rea­son­able request made by Zelen­sky back in June. Note how the cur­rent con­flict was already build­ing up at the same time Zelen­sky was warn­ing about renewed fight­ing in the Don­bas. It’s a reminder that the buildup of Russ­ian troops in the lead up to this inva­sion did­n’t just hap­pen overnight. It was a drawn out across 2021, was Ukraine’s NATO mem­ber­ship prospects were being open­ly debat­ed in the news like this. It’s all part of the large­ly for­got­ten con­text that imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ed the inva­sion:

    ...
    Zelen­skiy has urged NATO mem­bers to accel­er­ate Ukraine’s entry into the alliance after a stand­off with Rus­sia this year that saw Rus­sia mass addi­tion­al troops and mil­i­tary equip­ment near Ukraine’s bor­ders.

    Zelen­skiy said most of Rus­si­a’s troops had yet to with­draw, and that Rus­sia was drag­ging its feet on facil­i­tat­ing a meet­ing with Putin for no clear rea­son. About 11,000 troops had left and 95,000 remained, he esti­mat­ed.

    ...

    Zelen­skiy did not rule out anoth­er flare-up in the com­ing months in Ukraine’s con­flict with Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists, though in his assess­ment Rus­sia was not look­ing to pro­voke a “full-scale war”. Kyiv says the con­flict in east­ern Ukraine has killed 14,000 peo­ple since 2014.
    ...

    Final­ly, note how Zelen­sky also man­aged to fit in a few com­plaints about IMF aus­ter­i­ty, which is what the “reform demands” and “much-delayed IMF tranche” is refer­ring to. Recall how it was the EU’s aus­ter­i­ty-heavy offer made to then-Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanukovych back in the fall of 2013 that led to the col­lapse of the Ukraine’s EU ambi­tions, trig­ger­ing the Maid­an protests. And here we are, almost a decade lat­er and the aus­ter­i­ty demands are still there:

    ...
    He called on the Unit­ed States to pro­vide eco­nom­ic sup­port to Ukraine and urged both Biden and the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to be under­stand­ing of Ukraine’s prob­lems before plac­ing “unfair” reform demands on his pres­i­den­cy.

    ...

    He expects Ukraine to secure a much-delayed IMF tranche by the autumn though added Ukraine could still “live nor­mal­ly” with­out one.
    ...

    Will Zelen­sky final­ly get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer on NATO now? If not, that’s more or less our answer. An answer that appears to be stuck in a per­ma­nent state of ‘not yet, we can’t real­ly say, how about you keep fight­ing.’ Maybe Ukraine will final­ly get an answer after it defeats Rus­sia and trig­gers regime change. Just in time for the war with Chi­na.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 22, 2022, 4:44 pm

  2. Fol­low­ing up on Bill Ark­in’s impor­tant recent report about the rel­a­tive restraint — con­trary to vir­tu­al­ly all report­ing — being exhib­it­ed by Rus­si­a’s forces against Ukraine’s urban areas, here’s a pair of arti­cles relat­ed to one of the sce­nar­ios that is sig­nif­i­cant­ly enabled by a ‘Rus­sia is show­ing no mer­cy against the cities’ nar­ra­tive: A false flag chem­i­cal weapons attack sim­i­lar to what we saw car­ried out by jihadist forces mul­ti­ple times in Syr­ia. After all, if Rus­sia is will­ing to direct­ly tar­get res­i­den­tial areas, lev­el entire towns, ter­ror­ize pop­u­la­tions into sub­mis­sion, and gen­er­al­ly engage in what amount to war crimes, it’s not a stretch to sug­gest Rus­sia might resort to chem­i­cal weapons as part of its urban war­fare strat­e­gy.

    And sure enough, we are hear­ing grow­ing warn­ings about the inevitabil­i­ty of a Russ­ian chem­i­cal weapons attack. It’s grow­ing so like that US Pres­i­dent Joe Biden just declared that NATO would response ‘in kind’ in the event of such an attack. While the ‘in kind’ lan­guage appears to be more fig­u­ra­tive than lit­er­al, the fact that Biden felt the need to make this point under­scores the real­i­ty that a Russ­ian chem­i­cal weapons attack is increas­ing­ly be sold to the pub­lic as a very plau­si­ble, even like­ly, event. Biden’s ‘in kind’ response also sound­ed like an oblique way of say­ing NATO will begin engag­ing in direct mil­i­tary con­flict with Rus­sia. So a chem­i­cal weapons event would be enough to drag NATO direct­ly into the war. At least that’s a rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion of Biden’s answer.

    But there’s a far more omi­nous warn­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a false flag chem­i­cal attack in Ukraine: one of the WMD ‘experts’ who appeared to play a major role in pro­mot­ing sto­ries about chem­i­cal weapons attacks being car­ried out by the Assad gov­ern­ment — despite evi­dence they were false flag events orches­trat­ed by the extrem­ist jihadist rebels or some oth­er type of event — is already warn­ing about impend­ing Russ­ian chem­i­cal attacks. And this is the very same fig­ure who recent­ly warned the world about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of some­thing tru­ly mon­strous — like COVID spliced with Ebo­la — get­ting released from a Ukrain­ian bio­lab by Russ­ian forces: Hamish de Bret­ton Gor­don, the for­mer chief of the British Army’s chem­i­cal weapons unit. As we’ll see, in addi­tion to his word in the UK’s chem­i­cal weapons unit, de Bret­ton Gor­don Twit­ter pro­file once iden­ti­fied him as a mem­ber of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare divi­sion.

    Yes, the guy who has been warn­ing about the release of COVID-Ebo­la by Russ­ian forces from Ukrain­ian labs is the same guy who was push­ing sus­pect chem­i­cal weapons claims in Syr­ia. And now he’s warn­ing about Rus­sia using chem­i­cal weapons. You almost could­n’t come up for a more invit­ing envi­ron­ment for a false flag event.

    Ok, first, here’s a piece about how Biden is already pub­licly respond­ing to the grow­ing clam­or about the poten­tial Russ­ian use of chem­i­cal weapons by pledg­ing that NATO will respond ‘in kind’ to such an attack. Mean­ing a chem­i­cal weapons attack would like­ly turn­ing this war between Russ­ian and Ukraine into WWIII:

    The Inde­pen­dent

    Joe Biden says Nato would respond ‘in kind’ to Russ­ian use of chem­i­cal weapons

    Pres­i­dent spoke after sum­mits with allied lead­ers in Bel­gium

    Graeme Massie
    Los Ange­les
    03/24/2022

    Joe Biden says that Nato would respond “in kind” if Vladimir Putin used chem­i­cal weapons in Ukraine.

    The pres­i­dent spoke after a day of sum­mits in Bel­gium with Nato allies, the Euro­pean Union and G7 part­ners.

    Mr Biden was asked if chem­i­cal weapons were used in Ukraine, “would that trig­ger a mil­i­tary response from Nato”.

    Mr Biden replied: “It would trig­ger a response in kind, whether or not, you’re ask­ing whether Nato would cross, we’d make that deci­sion at the time.”

    Dur­ing the meet­ings Mr Biden also said he sup­port­ed expelling Rus­sia from the G20 eco­nom­ic group, and that if it is not pos­si­ble Ukraine should be able to attend meet­ings.

    ...

    Nato has said it will pro­vide Ukraine with equip­ment to pro­tect against chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, radi­o­log­i­cal as well as nuclear weapons.

    Mr Biden said before he left on his Euro­pean trip that there was a “real threat” of Rus­sia using chem­i­cal weapons.

    The Krem­lin has pre­vi­ous­ly ordered the use of chem­i­cal weapons in Syr­ia, and has poi­soned crit­ics such as Alex­ei Naval­ny and for­mer Russ­ian spy Sergei Skri­pal and his daugh­ter.

    ————

    “Joe Biden says Nato would respond ‘in kind’ to Russ­ian use of chem­i­cal weapons” by Graeme Massie; The Inde­pen­dent; 03/24/2022

    “Mr Biden replied: “It would trig­ger a response in kind, whether or not, you’re ask­ing whether Nato would cross, we’d make that deci­sion at the time.””

    What exact­ly did Biden mean by that state­ment? It’s a ques­tion the Ukrain­ian forces are no doubt keen on answer­ing. But note how the pre­vi­ous asser­tions — high­ly ques­tion­able asser­tions — of Russ­ian chem­i­cal weapon usage in Syr­ia are today used as the pre­text for these warn­ings. It’s a chill­ing exam­ple of the endur­ing pow­er of suc­cess­ful­ly stat­ing these kinds of events:

    ...
    Mr Biden said before he left on his Euro­pean trip that there was a “real threat” of Rus­sia using chem­i­cal weapons.

    The Krem­lin has pre­vi­ous­ly ordered the use of chem­i­cal weapons in Syr­ia, and has poi­soned crit­ics such as Alex­ei Naval­ny and for­mer Russ­ian spy Sergei Skri­pal and his daugh­ter.
    ...

    And now, here’s a piece in the Gray­zone describ­ing how Hamish de Bret­ton Gor­don — the same fig­ure who was warn­ing the world about Russ­ian forces releas­ing COVID-Ebo­la from a Ukrain­ian bio­lab — is now warn­ing of impend­ing Russ­ian chem­i­cal attacks. And when it comes to mak­ing bogus claims about chem­i­cal attacks, de Bret­ton Gor­don isn’t lack­ing in expe­ri­ence:

    The Gray­zone

    British intel­li­gence operative’s involve­ment in Ukraine cri­sis sig­nals false flag attacks ahead

    Kit Klaren­berg
    March 24, 2022

    Shad­owy UK intel fig­ure Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don was at the fore­front of chem­i­cal weapons decep­tions in Syr­ia. Now in Ukraine, he’s up to his old tricks again.

    With Wash­ing­ton and its NATO allies forced to watch from the side­lines as Russia’s mil­i­tary advances across East­ern Ukraine and encir­cles Kiev, US and British offi­cials have resort­ed to a trou­bling tac­tic that could trig­ger a mas­sive esca­la­tion. Fol­low­ing sim­i­lar claims by his Sec­re­tary of State and ambas­sador the Unit­ed Nations, US Pres­i­dent Joseph Biden has declared that Rus­sia will pay a “severe price” if it uses chem­i­cal weapons in Ukraine.

    The warn­ings ema­nat­ing from the Biden admin­is­tra­tion con­tain chill­ing echoes of those issued by the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma through­out the US-led dirty war on Syr­ia.

    Almost as soon as Oba­ma imple­ment­ed his ill-fat­ed “red line” pol­i­cy vow­ing an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary response if the Syr­i­an army attacked the West­ern-backed oppo­si­tion with chem­i­cal weapons, Al Qae­da-aligned oppo­si­tion fac­tions came forth with claims of mass casu­al­ty sarin and chlo­rine bomb­ings of civil­ians. The result was a series of US-UK mis­sile strikes on Dam­as­cus and a pro­longed cri­sis that near­ly trig­gered the kind of dis­as­trous regime change war that had desta­bi­lized Iraq and Libya.

    In each major chem­i­cal weapons event, signs of stag­ing and decep­tion by the armed Syr­i­an oppo­si­tion were present. As a for­mer US ambas­sador in the Mid­dle East told jour­nal­ist Charles Glass, “The ‘red line’ was an open invi­ta­tion to a false-­flag oper­a­tion.”

    Ele­ments of decep­tion were espe­cial­ly clear in the April 7, 2018 inci­dent in the city of Douma, when an anti-gov­ern­ment mili­tia on the brink of defeat claimed civil­ians had been mas­sa­cred in a chlo­rine attack by the Syr­i­an army.

    Vet­er­an inspec­tors from the Orga­ni­za­tion for the Pro­hi­bi­tion of Chem­i­cal Weapons (OPCW) found no evi­dence that the Syr­i­an army had car­ried out any such attack, how­ev­er, sug­gest­ing the entire inci­dent had been staged to trig­ger West­ern inter­ven­tion. Their report was sub­se­quent­ly cen­sored by orga­ni­za­tion man­age­ment, and the inspec­tors were sub­ject­ed to a cam­paign of smears and intim­i­da­tion.

    Through­out the Syr­i­an con­flict, a self-pro­claimed “chem­i­cal war­rior” named Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don was inti­mate­ly involved in numer­ous chem­i­cal weapons decep­tions that sus­tained the war and ratch­eted up pres­sure for West­ern mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion.

    This Feb­ru­ary 24, just moments after Russia’s mil­i­tary entered Ukraine, de Bret­ton-Gor­don sur­faced again in British media to claim that Rus­sia was prepar­ing a chem­i­cal attack on Ukrain­ian civil­ians. He has since demand­ed that Ukraini­ans be pro­vid­ed with a guide he wrote called, “How To Sur­vive A Chem­i­cal Attack.”

    How to Sur­vive a Chem­i­cal or Bio­log­i­cal Attack — this is Free — please dis­sem­i­nate as wide­ly as pos­si­ble to civil­ians in #Ukraine & sur­round­ing coun­tries https://t.co/tkV4Nb3PaO— Hamish DBG (@HamishDBG) March 22, 2022

    ...

    Hours after war erupts, a “chem­i­cal war­rior” demands West­ern esca­la­tion

    Fol­low­ing months of fevered spec­u­la­tion about an impend­ing Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine, when it final­ly came to pass on the ear­ly morn­ing of Feb­ru­ary 24th, most were caught entire­ly by sur­prise. Media out­lets and pun­dits scram­bled to get their sto­ries straight, while West­ern lead­ers rushed to con­struct a cohe­sive ‘response’.

    By con­trast, Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don, a British army vet­er­an iden­ti­fied by UK media as a “for­mer spy,” was in no such mud­dle. With­in just three hours, he had a fiery op-ed pre­pared for The Guardian, demand­ing the US and Europe “show their steel in the face of Putin’s aggres­sion.” Warn­ing that Vladimir Putin was “much more will­ing to face off with NATO” than before, de Bret­ton-Gor­don charged that the West “stood back and watched in Syr­ia,” and “it must not do the same in Ukraine.”

    “Syr­ia shows what hap­pens when you turn a blind eye and are too heav­i­ly influ­enced by peaceniks,” de Bret­ton-Gor­don ful­mi­nat­ed. “Those of us involved in inter­ven­tions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 30 years…we look at Syr­ia and know we should have done bet­ter. That knowl­edge should inform our response to Putin’s aggres­sion now.”

    In real­i­ty, Wash­ing­ton and its allies did not stand back and watch in Syr­ia; it waged a decade-long proxy war employ­ing jihadist para­mil­i­taries and airstrikes on Dam­as­cus, then occu­pied oil-pro­duc­ing por­tions of the coun­try and sub­ject­ed its cit­i­zens to crip­pling sanc­tions, which to this day deprive them of food, elec­tric­i­ty and vital med­ical sup­plies.

    Of all peo­ple, de Bret­ton-Gor­don – whose Twit­ter pro­file once iden­ti­fied him as a mem­ber of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s offi­cial psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare divi­sion – is unique­ly placed to know of these hor­rors. After all, he played a piv­otal role in pro­mot­ing and extend­ing the dirty war through the man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing chem­i­cal weapons inci­dents.

    Manip­u­la­tion, absur­di­ties and obvi­ous fraud

    As The Gray­zone has revealed, the involve­ment of de Bret­ton-Gor­don in the Syr­i­an con­flict dates back to at least 2013, when by his own admis­sion he was engaged in a covert effort to smug­gle soil sam­ples out of the oppo­si­tion-occu­pied areas. This work would have inevitably placed him in extreme­ly close quar­ters with jihadist ele­ments rak­ing in West­ern fund­ing while ben­e­fit­ing from NATO train­ing and weapons.

    Con­tem­po­rary media reports reveal the UK’s MI6 was engaged in a sam­ple-gath­er­ing effort in the coun­try at the very time time de Bret­ton-Gor­don was inside Syr­ia, strong­ly sug­gest­ing his link­age to the for­eign intel­li­gence agency. One arti­cle makes abun­dant­ly clear the pur­pose of the soil-sam­ple exer­cise was to push the US into inter­ven­ing by prov­ing gov­ern­ment cul­pa­bil­i­ty for alleged chem­i­cal weapons attacks.

    Oth­er forms of evi­dence were also col­lect­ed on-the-ground by de Bret­ton-Gor­don, and pro­vid­ed to a num­ber of offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tions into chem­i­cal attacks. In at least one instance – an OPCW/UN Joint Inves­tiga­tive Mech­a­nism (JIM) probe into a pur­port­ed chem­i­cal strike in Talmenes, April 2014 – videos sub­mit­ted by CBRN Task­force, a shady orga­ni­za­tion he found­ed in Alep­po, were found to show clear signs of fal­si­fi­ca­tion.

    De Bret­ton-Gor­don threw his chem­i­cal weapons exper­tise into fur­ther doubt when he told British media that any com­mon refrig­er­a­tor could be trans­formed into a chem­i­cal weapon, false­ly claim­ing that R22 refrig­er­ant cylin­ders con­tained mate­r­i­al for impro­vised chlo­rine bombs. “Some­body could go to a waste site where peo­ple chuck away fridges [in the UK] and get a whole bunch of those things and blow them up,” the sup­posed arms spe­cial­ist claimed.

    Hamish made the fol­low claims regard­ing house­hold fridges and chlo­rine bombs: https://t.co/VJUOyW1UAR ... he is still reg­u­lar­ly used by UK media @haynesdeborah @bbclysedoucet @F1onaHill pic.twitter.com/ytgQqdbjIp— Piers Robin­son (@PiersRobinson1) August 9, 2019

    De Bret­ton Gor­don has gone as far as claim­ing to a British tabloid that Rus­sia could deploy mis­siles and hand grenades con­tain­ing the high­ly dead­ly Sovi­et-era chem­i­cal agent Novi­chok “in any future war with the West.”

    Such absurd com­men­tary and sub­terfuge has done noth­ing to dent de Bretton-Gordon’s cred­i­bil­i­ty, how­ev­er. His main­stream pro­file has only grown over time, with out­lets invari­ably pre­sent­ing him as a coura­geous human rights defend­er risk­ing his life to train local doc­tors and res­cue work­ers.

    On more than one occa­sion, how­ev­er, de Bret­ton-Gor­don has direct­ly involved West­ern jour­nal­ists in MI6’s soil gath­er­ing efforts. For instance, dur­ing a 2014 pod­cast inter­view with Wilton Park, an NGO fund­ed by the UK For­eign Office, de Bret­ton-Gor­don boast­ed of his respon­si­bil­i­ty for a sto­ry in the Times of Lon­don alleg­ing a Syr­i­an chem­i­cal attack in the town of Sheikh al-Maq­sood.

    “In March last year there was a report­ed sarin attack in Sheikh al-Maq­sood and I helped the Times – chap called Antho­ny Lloyd who very sad­ly got shot two weeks ago – to cov­er this sto­ry and tried to get sam­ples to the UK for analy­sis … I won’t go into the details of that,” he recalled.

    Then-Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron invoked the Sheikh al-Maq­sood inci­dent to increase pres­sure on Dam­as­cus, cit­ing “the pic­ture as described to me by the Joint Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee” as the basis for his asser­tion of a chem­i­cal attack against the town by the Syr­i­an army.

    ...

    Months before war, US trains Ukraini­ans in the threat of “tar­get­ed weapons of mass destruc­tion attacks”

    Back in May 2021, the State Depart­ment announced that Wash­ing­ton had con­duct­ed a “vir­tu­al train­ing exer­cise” with “part­ners” in Kiev, includ­ing domes­tic secu­ri­ty ser­vices, law enforce­ment, and first respon­ders, to “iden­ti­fy, respond to, and inves­ti­gate assas­si­na­tions involv­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion,” due to “recent events in Europe” high­light­ing “the real threat of gov­ern­ment-sanc­tioned, tar­get­ed weapons of mass destruc­tion attacks.”

    Along the way, Ukraini­ans were tutored in “[iden­ti­fy­ing] the med­ical symp­toms that indi­cate WMD mate­r­i­al use, the attack cycle involved in WMD assas­si­na­tion attempts, and the spe­cif­ic mea­sures that enable safe and secure detec­tion and response to WMD inci­dents.”

    Quite why this instruc­tion was giv­en at this par­tic­u­lar time is unclear, as was the “recent events in Europe” to which the press release referred. Per­haps the State Depart­ment was allud­ing to the alleged novi­chok poi­son­ing of the Russ­ian oppo­si­tion fig­ure Alex­ei Naval­ny in August 2020. On what grounds that failed assas­si­na­tion neces­si­tat­ed a grand, mul­ti-agency train­ing exer­cise in deal­ing with “tar­get­ed WMD attacks” is anyone’s guess.

    What­ev­er the pur­pose of the US train­ing pro­gram was, Ukrain­ian secu­ri­ty per­son­nel can now claim they have the train­ing to iden­ti­fy the pre­cise “med­ical symp­toms that indi­cate WMD mate­r­i­al.”

    This is sig­nif­i­cant, because ever since the con­flict began, Kiev has exhib­it­ed an end­less enthu­si­asm for lying, hav­ing dis­tort­ed or even out­right con­coct­ed events and facts whole-cloth to advance its objec­tives on count­less occa­sions.

    The most dan­ger­ous claims advanced by Ukrain­ian pro­pa­gan­dists have been rein­forced by the sup­posed author­i­ty of de Bret­ton-Gor­don, who has argued that Russ­ian chem­i­cal strikes were absolute­ly inevitable, based his pre­dic­tion on his opin­ion that Moscow “has no morals or scru­ples.”

    The self-styled chem­i­cal weapons expert has even cau­tioned that Putin could deploy nuclear weapons or cre­ate a pan­dem­ic “more dead­ly than Covid” with an Ebo­la weapon. He has fur­ther spec­u­lat­ed that Russ­ian forces may unleash a dead­ly virus seized from one of sev­er­al Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed bio­labs in Ukraine, then blame it on the US.

    From Syr­ia to Ukraine, it is hap­pen­ing again

    In a typ­i­cal media appear­ance, on March 10th, de Bret­ton Gor­don told London’s LBC radio show that “noth­ing is off the table at this stage.” Among the hor­rors he fore­cast was the use of white phos­pho­rous “to set towns and cities on fire.”

    Jus­ti­fy­ing his cer­tain­ty, de Bret­ton-Gor­don force­ful­ly assert­ed, “the only way to take a large city or town ulti­mate­ly is to use chem­i­cal weapons.” He point­ed to Syr­ia to prove his point – but with­out ref­er­enc­ing his own piv­otal role in esca­lat­ing that con­flict through the manip­u­la­tion of evi­dence and sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly bereft fear-mon­ger­ing in the media.

    Now, de Bret­ton-Gor­don has resur­faced at the cen­ter of the aggres­sive push for esca­la­tion with a nuclear armed Rus­sia. If his role in Syr­ia is any guide, a series of cyn­i­cal decep­tions could be on the way.

    ————

    “British intel­li­gence operative’s involve­ment in Ukraine cri­sis sig­nals false flag attacks ahead” by Kit Klaren­berg; The Gray­zone; 03/24/2022

    ““Syr­ia shows what hap­pens when you turn a blind eye and are too heav­i­ly influ­enced by peaceniks,” de Bret­ton-Gor­don ful­mi­nat­ed. “Those of us involved in inter­ven­tions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 30 years…we look at Syr­ia and know we should have done bet­ter. That knowl­edge should inform our response to Putin’s aggres­sion now.””

    Those are some omi­nous words from Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don. Omi­nous if accept­ed at face val­ue, but even more omi­nous when we con­sid­er de Bret­ton-Gor­don’s track record on these mat­ters. A track record of pro­mot­ing high­ly sus­pect WMD claims about the use of chem­i­cal weapons in Syr­ia and hyp­ing vir­tu­al­ly any threat he can imag­ine. But per­haps the most omi­nous warn­ing from de Bret­ton-Gor­don is his warn­ings that Russ­ian forces might release dead­ly virus­es seized from Ukrain­ian bio­labs and blame it on the US. It’s per­haps the strongest (and most iron­ic) con­fir­ma­tion we got that there real­ly are some very nasty bugs being devel­oped in some of these labs:

    ...
    This Feb­ru­ary 24, just moments after Russia’s mil­i­tary entered Ukraine, de Bret­ton-Gor­don sur­faced again in British media to claim that Rus­sia was prepar­ing a chem­i­cal attack on Ukrain­ian civil­ians. He has since demand­ed that Ukraini­ans be pro­vid­ed with a guide he wrote called, “How To Sur­vive A Chem­i­cal Attack.”

    ...

    Fol­low­ing months of fevered spec­u­la­tion about an impend­ing Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine, when it final­ly came to pass on the ear­ly morn­ing of Feb­ru­ary 24th, most were caught entire­ly by sur­prise. Media out­lets and pun­dits scram­bled to get their sto­ries straight, while West­ern lead­ers rushed to con­struct a cohe­sive ‘response’.

    By con­trast, Hamish de Bret­ton-Gor­don, a British army vet­er­an iden­ti­fied by UK media as a “for­mer spy,” was in no such mud­dle. With­in just three hours, he had a fiery op-ed pre­pared for The Guardian, demand­ing the US and Europe “show their steel in the face of Putin’s aggres­sion.” Warn­ing that Vladimir Putin was “much more will­ing to face off with NATO” than before, de Bret­ton-Gor­don charged that the West “stood back and watched in Syr­ia,” and “it must not do the same in Ukraine.”

    ...

    In real­i­ty, Wash­ing­ton and its allies did not stand back and watch in Syr­ia; it waged a decade-long proxy war employ­ing jihadist para­mil­i­taries and airstrikes on Dam­as­cus, then occu­pied oil-pro­duc­ing por­tions of the coun­try and sub­ject­ed its cit­i­zens to crip­pling sanc­tions, which to this day deprive them of food, elec­tric­i­ty and vital med­ical sup­plies.

    Of all peo­ple, de Bret­ton-Gor­don – whose Twit­ter pro­file once iden­ti­fied him as a mem­ber of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s offi­cial psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare divi­sion – is unique­ly placed to know of these hor­rors. After all, he played a piv­otal role in pro­mot­ing and extend­ing the dirty war through the man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing chem­i­cal weapons inci­dents.

    ...

    De Bret­ton Gor­don has gone as far as claim­ing to a British tabloid that Rus­sia could deploy mis­siles and hand grenades con­tain­ing the high­ly dead­ly Sovi­et-era chem­i­cal agent Novi­chok “in any future war with the West.”

    ...

    The most dan­ger­ous claims advanced by Ukrain­ian pro­pa­gan­dists have been rein­forced by the sup­posed author­i­ty of de Bret­ton-Gor­don, who has argued that Russ­ian chem­i­cal strikes were absolute­ly inevitable, based his pre­dic­tion on his opin­ion that Moscow “has no morals or scru­ples.”

    The self-styled chem­i­cal weapons expert has even cau­tioned that Putin could deploy nuclear weapons or cre­ate a pan­dem­ic “more dead­ly than Covid” with an Ebo­la weapon. He has fur­ther spec­u­lat­ed that Russ­ian forces may unleash a dead­ly virus seized from one of sev­er­al Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed bio­labs in Ukraine, then blame it on the US.
    ...

    Adding to the omi­nous nature of de Bret­ton-Gor­don’s warn­ings is the fact that the US held train­ing exer­cis­es less than a year ago in Kiev on how to iden­ti­fy and respond to a range of WMD attacks. And while the con­fir­ma­tion of any WMD attack would like­ly involve an inter­na­tion­al team of experts to assess the sit­u­a­tion, the fact that Ukrain­ian secu­ri­ty ser­vices were instruct­ed in how to detect these attacks implies the exis­tence of the knowl­edge need­ed to stage an attack too:

    ...
    Back in May 2021, the State Depart­ment announced that Wash­ing­ton had con­duct­ed a “vir­tu­al train­ing exer­cise” with “part­ners” in Kiev, includ­ing domes­tic secu­ri­ty ser­vices, law enforce­ment, and first respon­ders, to “iden­ti­fy, respond to, and inves­ti­gate assas­si­na­tions involv­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion,” due to “recent events in Europe” high­light­ing “the real threat of gov­ern­ment-sanc­tioned, tar­get­ed weapons of mass destruc­tion attacks.”

    Along the way, Ukraini­ans were tutored in “[iden­ti­fy­ing] the med­ical symp­toms that indi­cate WMD mate­r­i­al use, the attack cycle involved in WMD assas­si­na­tion attempts, and the spe­cif­ic mea­sures that enable safe and secure detec­tion and response to WMD inci­dents.”
    ...

    How much longer before we get the grim ini­tial reports about a bru­tal urban chem­i­cal attack? It feels like just a mat­ter of time at this point. So should we end up get­ting those reports, let’s hope the world is will­ing to take a clos­er look at the actu­al evi­dence this time. We weren’t look­ing at the poten­tial­ly for WWIII in Syr­ia. This is a very dif­fer­ent sce­nario.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 25, 2022, 3:24 pm

  3. OUN‑B Lead­ers Ban­dera, Stet­sko, Lebed and the their Fas­cist Sym­pa­thies and Nazi Col­lab­o­ra­tion

    There was a cable from a July, 1949 CIA Memo involv­ing Spe­cial Oper­a­tions it includ­ed the fol­low­ing state­ments.:
    2. STETSKO WAS TEMPORARILY HONORARY NON CHARTER MEMBER OF ZPUHVR BECAUSE OF HIS POSITION IN ABN. ZPUHVR REPUDIATED STCTSKO IN LATE SPRINO 48 AND FORMALLY OUSTED HIM IN EARLY 49 . ALTHO HE CAN SPEAK AS REPRESENTATIVE OF OUN/BANDERA AND ABN HE HAS NO RIGHT SPEAK FOR UPA OR UHVR. FURTHERMORE BY ORDER OF THE C.G. OF UPA ALL MEMBERS UPA ABROAD FALL UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF MILITARY SECTION OF ZPUHVR HEADED BY CARTEL 1.

    3. STETSKO AND BANDERA REPRESENT PRE ‑42 . UKRAINIAN POLITICAL ATTITUDE OF ULTRA-NATIONALISM ON NAZI PATTERN AND MONO (RCVD MONO) ‑PARTY GOVT BY FORCE. GERMAN OCCUPATION CURED POPULACE TO How or THIS ATTITUDE DURING YEARS STETSKO AND BANDERA INTERNED. BY 43 PEOPLE WANTED REPRESENTATIVE GOVT BY CONSENT AND YEAR FOLLOWING UHVR FORMED. CARTEL 7 AND 8 CONFIRM THAT POL’TICAL PRINCIPLE OF BANOERA AM) STETSKO NO LONGER CURRENT IN UKRAINE.

    4. SECURITY OF STETSKO BANDERA CLIQUE BAD. CARTELS CLAIM THEY ALREADY AWARE OF VAGUE CONTACT BETWEEN OUN BANDERA AND AMERICAN OF- FICIALS IN PARIS ALTHO NO DETAILS KNOWN TO THEM.

    8. TO DEMONSTRATE UNPOPULARITY OF BANDERA-STETSK0 IN UKRAINE SEE PARA 3 SECTION IV IN ATTACHMENT TO (unde­ci­pher­able) Dat­ed 8 NOVEMBER 48
    •
    Note how Ban­dera and Stet­sko were not pop­u­lar with the Ukrain­ian Inde­pen­dence move­ment (who were run by peo­ple who sup­port­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and were against these Nazi type author­i­tar­i­ans). In the 1950’s through pow­er­plays and treach­ery these two would take over OUN.
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/STETSKO%2C%20YAROSLAV_0020.pdf

    A cable from the Direc­tor Office Secu­ri­ty in the Depart­ment of State to CIA Direc­tor of Plans 11-20-1956, Ref­er­ences an August 29, 1956 – Appli­ca­tion for a Vis­i­tors Visa in US for Yaroslav Stet­sko. It includes the fol­low­ing:
    The State Department’s Mr. Freers “ten­ta­tive­ly believes that Stetsko’s entrance into the US would be prej­u­di­cial to the pub­lic inter­est. How­ev­er, before rec­om­mend­ing that Stet­sko for­mal­ly be denied a visa under Sec­tion 212(•)(27) of the Nation­al­i­ty Act RE sug­gests that the fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion regard­ing Stet­sko.” Should be devel­oped.
    • Stetsko’s role in the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment which was estab­lished in Lem­berg in 1941; char­ac­ter of this gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly its rela­tion­ship to the Nazi Gov­ern­ment and its poli­cies toward the peo­ple. (There are per­sis­tent sto­ries that upwards of 130,000 Ukraini­ans were assas­si­nat­ed by the gov­ern­ment in the few weeks it was in pow­er.)
    The activ­i­ties of Stet­sko and his polit­i­cal organ­i­sa­tions in intim­i­dat­ing entire refugee camps in the post war years; the use of assas­si­na­tions and gang­ster-like meth­ods to keep Ukraini­ans in line dur­ing this peri­od; the extent and nature of Maf­fia-type oper­a­tions, pos­si­bly ex- tend­ing into the US; and Stetsko’s connection’s and con­trol over these forces.
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/STETSKO%2C%20YAROSLAV_0087.pdf

    For more analy­sis on this top­ic, this 1954 CIA memo rein­forces that Ban­dera was not so pop­u­lar in OUN after the war but fought his sta­tus. It men­tions OUN cells dur­ing WWII and an under­ground net­work.
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80S01540R006000090003‑9.pdf

    This next memo which has 1 para­graph dossiers on OUN mem­ber includ­ed
    • Ban­dera and states he was the “Lead­ing nation­al­ist and cofounder of OUN. After the death of Colonel Kono­valets, assumed lead­er­ship of entire OUN. .. pur­sued his aims ruth­less­ly. {Note that Colonel Kono­valetz was a Ger­man Abwehr agent who was assas­si­nat­ed by the Gestapo in 1938}.
    • Kono­valets – Colonel; was one of the old­est and best known lead­ers of Ukrain­ian lib­er­a­tion move­ment and Ukraini­ang Nar­tion­al Self Defense (UNS); was founder and, togeth­er with Mel’nik leader of OUN. Was shot in Ams­ter­daym in 1938.
    • Lebed’, Ste­fan – Cov­er name; Vil’nyy; polit­i­cal leader of UPA; had ille­gal­ly tak­en active part in pol­i­tics ear­li­er and has been known as extreme­ly rad­i­cal. Attempt­ed to gain mil­i­tary con­trol of the UPA, but did not suc­ceed. Con­se­quent split between Lebed’ and Suke­vich was aggra­vat­ed by the fat that Lebed’ go in touch with par­ti­san leader Kol­pakov in order to coop­er­ate with the Bol­she­vists.
    Mil’nik, Andreas – Engi­neer; took part in Ukrain­ian war of inde­pen­dence 1918–20. Emi­grat­ed to Paris and there found­ed togeth­er with oth­er famous Ukrain­ian nation­al­ists, the Ukrain­ian Nation­al Union. Took part in uni­fi­ca­tion of var­i­ous groups in OUN in 1929. After death of Colonel Kon­va­lets was defeat­ed by Ste­fan Ban­dera for lead­er­ship of OUN. His fol­low­ers left OUN under his lead­er­ship and formed the so-called Mel’nik group.
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00809A000600330323‑6.pdf

    This next memo does not have the author list­ed but was from the declas­si­fied CIA files and was writ­ten Feb­ru­ary 4, 1948. The Sub­ject was Ban­dera. It also iden­ti­fies Ban­dera as a ter­ror­ist It states:
    1.- Ste­fan BANDERA, who since the begin­ning of his polit­i­cal career has been anti-Russ­ian and anti-Pol­ish, is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist leader today, togeth­er with Andrei MELNYK. He was a mem­ber of the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion OUN (Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists) and was involved in the assas­si­na­tion of (fnu) PIERACEI, the Pol­ish Min­is­ter of the Inte­ri­or. When Col. Eugene KONOWALETZ was mur­dered by the NKVD in Rot­ter­dam, BANDERA did not accept the nom­i­na­tion of MELNYE as head of ail Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions through­out the world.

    2. In 1941 with ‘the occu­pa­tion of Lwow by the Ger­mans, BANDERA split with the our and began such an inten­sive fight against ‘It that it result­ed in the mur­der of (fnu) SCIBORSEI, NEL­NYK’s resen­ta­tive in Zhit­o­mir. Short­ly there­after BANDERA pro­claimed Lwow the “Inde­pen­dent West Ukrain­ian Repub­lic,’ appoint­ing him­self its pres­i­dent and nam­ing STECHKO (STECKO) Prime Yin­is­ter. This move met with the approval of a large major­i­ty of Ukraini­ans includ­ing the head of the Greek Catholic Chtirch Arch­bish­op .(fnu) SZEPTYCKI, and it was believed that. it would also meet with the approval .of the Ger­mans as was the Case in Slo­va­kia with the TIS$0 gov­ern­ment.

    3. How­ev­er 48 hours after his procla­ma­tion-BAN­DERA was arrest­ed by the Ger­mans and placed in a con­cen­tra­tion camp. There he met- many Poles, among them Gen. GROT-ROWECKI. While impris­oned-BAN­DERA. real­ized that it would be nec­es­sary to coop­er­ate with the Poles in order to fight Ger­man as well as Sovi­et impe­ri­al­ism. BAN­DER­A’s orga­ni­za­tion con­tin­ued to exist dur­ing his impris­on­ment, and it was dur­ing this peri­od that the UPA, Ukrain­ian guer­ril­la orga­ni­za­tion, was-formed to fight against Ger­man and Sovi­et troops.

    4. When BANDERA, regained his free­dom, he resumed lead­er­ship of his orga­ni­za­tion, and he soon formed the Ukrain­ian Coun­cil of Nation­al Lib­er­a­tion which worked under­ground. “Under BANDERA this orga­ni­za- tion had a For­eign Depart­ment to which Ros­tislav SZULGIN
    (Choul-GUINE) and (fnu) BERAN belonged. Its address is 11 Rue Chante- poulet, Gene­va,- Switzer­land. BANDERA also acti­vat­ed an-“anti- Bol­she­vik bloc of nations” in order to coop­er­ate with oth­er nation­al­i­ties under Russ­ian dom­i­na­tion.

    5. Groups of “Ban­derovt­sy” are still active in Sovi­et-dom­i­nat­ed
    Areas. In .Argenti­na Some BANDERA fol­low­ers are mem­bers of. “Prosvi­ta” which is lobat­ed at Calle Sol­er 5039, Buenos Aires.
    • {It is inter­est­ing that they oper­at­ed in Argenti­na, the same coun­try where the Bor­mann Orga­ni­za­tion oper­at­ed after the war. Ban­dera orga­ni­za­ed the ABN which was an out­growth of Hitler’s Anti-Com­mitern Pact of 1936.}
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA%2C%20STEFAN_0010.pdf

    A Feb­ru­ary, 1986 Vil­lage Voice Arti­cle by was writ­ten by Joe Cona­son with assis­tance from Ellen McGama­han, Lesli Yenkin, and Kevin Coogan.
    Myko­la Lebed was a Nazi war crim­i­nal and Coop­er­at­ed with the CIA and became a US Cit­i­zen. The arti­cle stats “most his­to­ri­ans regard the OUN as whol­ly fas­cist – and tied to Ger­man intel­li­gence from its incep­tion”..

    The arti­cle states that Lebed “attempt­ed to get an insight into the tac­tics of the Ger­man State Police and suc­ceed­ed in join­ing the GESTAPO school in ZAKOPANE (Dis­trict of Krakow) from which he ulti­mate­ly fled.” And a card in the CIC file iden­ti­fied Lebed as a Grad­u­ate of the Zakopane, Poland crim­i­nal police school.”.”

    The arti­cle men­tions how Lebed tor­tured an inno­cent jew­ish per­son to get a false con­fes­sion out of him.

    When OUN‑B split with their old lead­er­ship in 1941 Ban­dera com­mis­sioned the cre­ation of a “secu­ri­ty ser­vice” the Sluzha Bezpeky (SB) under Lebed’s com­mand. It has rep­u­ta­tion for ruth­less­ness. He as one his­to­ri­an a Mr. Arm­strong described “devel­oped a ter­ri­ble ter­ror­ist com­plex. He killed oth­er Ukraini­ans, rivals in the orga­ni­za­tion {OUN}.” Lebed adopt­ed a nom de guerre Maxym Ruban. He car­ried a war against his rivals with OUN and liq­ui­dat­ed lead­ing fig­ures in the Ukrain­ian resis­tance (their allies) where were non-OUN forces accord­ing to a 1948 CIC memo.

    Lebed was employed by the CIA after the war. The arti­cle also sates “(Ban­dera , too obtained a post with West­ern intel­li­gence agency- the West Ger­man BND, run by the for­mer Nazi Abwehr chief Rein­hard Gehlen who recruit­ed scores of ex-Nazis and col­lab­o­ra­tors for his net­work. In his mem­oirs, Gehlen iden­ti­fied Ban­dera as one of his men.)”
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000201220002‑6.pdf

    A June 1973 memo from the Secret Ser­vice Intel­li­gence Divi­sion – FIB regard­ing a Brezh­nev vis­it iden­ti­fied from an offi­cial of anoth­er gov­ern­ment that Yaroslav Stet­sko was the leader of OUN and described it as a “Extrem­ist-ter­ror­ist orgaina­tion” Yaroslav Stet­sko was head of the for­eign branch of OUN this and was alleged­ly in West Ger­many but now was in the US. They request­ed a trace on him.
    • https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/STETSKO%2C%20YAROSLAV_0143.pdf

    In sum­ma­ry in Ukraine today, we see patri­ot­ic Ukraini­ans wav­ing Ban­dera flags and wear­ing Ban­dera T‑shirts. We should be aware that Ban­dera did not believe in democ­ra­cy and was a fas­cist with exten­sive ties to the Nazis. He ran a ruth­less orga­ni­za­tion and was an anti-semi­te. When he was arrest­ed and kept in Ger­many, dur­ing most of the war he was under house arrest and was well treat­ed. He had access to Yaroslav Stet­sko dur­ing most of the war.

    Posted by Mary Benton | March 27, 2022, 9:39 am

Post a comment

The 99% Dynamic

Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
1980 broadcast highlights economic concentration and its historical relationship to fascism. Read more »