Russia's Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defence (RCB) Troops began detailing the extent of the US bioweapons program in Ukraine last spring. Washington initially dismissed the revelations, but undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland eventually confirmed that the US does indeed have biolabs in Ukraine.

The Russian military has accumulated a collection of over 20,000 documents related to the US military-biological program in Ukraine, RCB Troops Chief Igor Kirillov has revealed.

"Over the period of the special military operation, Russian troops have secured over 20,000 documents, references and analytical materials, and interviewed eyewitnesses and participants in American military-biological programs," the officer said in a briefing in Moscow on Monday.

These materials, which continue to be reviewed and deciphered, confirm without a doubt the Pentagon's intent to create biological weapons in Ukraine, and to test them out on the populations of the Eastern European country and its neighbours, Kirillov said.

The RCB Troops chief provided a number of new details on Washington's activities, including a large-scale effort he said was undertaken in 2022 to evacuate Ukrainian specialists working on bioweapons to Western countries, including the US, Canada and the European Union. The relocation was undertaken in part to prevent Russia from interviewing these personnel to obtain more information about activities which may be in contravention of international obligations and treaty norms, Kirillov said.

Kirillov also outlined US efforts to transfer biological materials out of Ukraine into Poland, the Baltic states and Central Asia amid the curtailing of programs in Ukraine.

"The Pentagon is actively transferring unfinished research in the framework of Ukrainian projects to the states of Central Asia and Europe," the officer said, adding that Russia has information on US efforts to ramp up bio-defence cooperation with countries in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region as well - including Kenya, Singapore and Thailand.

"Under pressure from the international community, Washington is changing its approaches to organising military-biological activities, shifting the functions of customer to civilian departments - the Department of Health, the Energy Department, and the United States Agency for International Development [USAID, ed]. This allows the US administration to avoid criticism at international venues" and reduce pressure on the Pentagon and the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Kirillov said.
 

New Questions About Coronaviruses

Referencing documents obtained and studied by the RCB Troops, Kirillov pointed to evidence that specialists from the EcoHealth Alliance has been engaged in research on coronavirus strain transmission mechanisms since at least 2015. EcoHealth Alliance is the US government-funded non-governmental organisation which funded controversial gain of function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and which has been accused of helping to spark the global coronavirus pandemic in 2019.

"Earlier, we informed you about the work being carried out at Boston University to enhance the pathogenic properties of COVID-19, funded by US government money, and about the possible involvement of USAID in the emergence of a new coronavirus," Kirillov said.

"The key role in the implementation of these projects belongs to the EcoHealth Alliance intermediary. Documents received from DTRA confirm that since 2015, specialists from this entity have been studying the diversity of the bat population, searching for new strains of the coronavirus, mechanisms of their transmission from animals to humans. In total, more than 2,500 specimens were studied," Kirillov said.

Full document can be found here.
 

Questions About mRNA Vaccines and Event-201

Kirillov also pointed to outstanding questions about the apparent high degree of preparedness by American manufacturers to create mRNA vaccines specifically against coronaviruses, and pandemic planning by US officials and business leaders before COVID-19 was unleashed on the world.

"One gets the impression that pharmaceutical companies developed vaccines in advance, but could not bring them to market quickly due to the specificities of virus, which subsequently manifested itself in the low effectiveness of vaccination and numerous adverse reactions," the officer said.

Kirillov found it curious that "on October 18, 2019, two months before the first official reports of the emergence of a new coronavirus infection in China, Johns Hopkins University, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, held the Event-201 exercise in New York. In the course of this event, steps were practiced in the context of an epidemic involving a previously unknown coronavirus, which, according to legend, would be transferred from bats to humans through an intermediate host - a pig."

Full document can be found here.

"The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic precisely in accordance with the [Event-201] scenario raises questions about its possible deliberate nature, US involvement, as well as the real goals of US bioprograms aimed at enhancing the properties of dangerous pathogens," Kirillov said.

Complete document and summary can be found here and here.
 

Dangerous and Illegal Research in Ukraine

"We have repeatedly pointed out that the United States carries out its most controversial research, from the point of view of international law, outside its own territory," the officer said. One example is the experiments related to HIV infections conducted by American specialists on the territory of Ukraine since 2019. "Please take note of the fact that the target groups are not only 'patients at high risk of infection' - like people in prison or those suffering from drug addiction, but also personnel from the Ukraine's Armed Forces," Kirillov said.

According to Kirillov, after the liberation of the village of Rubezhnoye in the Lugansk People's Republic, investigators were able to examine the premises of the Pharmbiotest medical centre, determining that it was used to carry out clinical trials of experimental drugs with serious side effects for the treatment of leukaemia, mental disorders, neurological diseases, epilepsy and others.

Separately, earlier this month, residents in Lisichansk, Lugansk discovered a large burial site containing the remnants of biomaterials belonging to Pharmbiotest, including clinical sample and outpatient records. The fact that these materials were buried, instead of being burned, suggests that the elimination of this evidence was carried out with "extreme haste," Kirillov said.

Russia is concerned about evidence on the use of psychostimulants and narcotics by Ukrainian military personnel, including methadone and amphetamines, notwithstanding their criminalized status under Ukraine's own laws, the officer said.

"We believe that the actions of officials who have conducted research on Ukrainian military personnel whose blood contained high concentrations of antibiotics, narcotics, and antibodies to pathogens of infectious diseases require an appropriate legal evaluation," Kirillov stressed, pointing, for example, to extensive research by the Military Institute of the Taras Shevchenko Kiev National University involving water soluble antifatigue drugs on troops.

Full PDF document here. additional papers on Ukrainian research in this field here.
 

Russian Military Will Continue Unmasking US Biowarfare Program

"I would like to note that the publication by Russia on the Pentagon's military biological programs in Ukraine have received significant public interest. Mass demonstrations against the activities of US-funded biological laboratories have taken place in the countries of the post-Soviet space. Public organisations of the Eurasian Economic Union have adopted a resolution against biolabs funded by the Pentagon. A number of investigations have also been initiated inside the US itself," Kirillov said.

"The concern of the world community related to the activities of Pentagon-funded biolabs is growing precipitously. Issues raised by Russia at international platforms, including the Ninth Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention State Parties, as well as the United Nations Security Council, have shown a lack of US willingness to engage in substantive dialogue. We consider it fundamentally important that the disclosure of facts about illegal military-biological activities has forced a number of countries to weigh the consequences of their interaction with the United States in the field of biosecurity, and take a fresh look at the need and expediency of such cooperation. The Russian Ministry of Defence will continue to work in this direction, and will keep you informed," Kirillov concluded.

Credits : Ilya Tsukanov
- A Moscow-based correspondent specialising in Eastern European, US and Middle Eastern politics, Cold War history, energy security and military affairs

In fulfilment of his solemn, constitutionally-enshrined obligation, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on January 28, 2003, stood before the rostrum in the chambers of the United States Congress and addressed the American people.

“Mr. Speaker,” the President began, “Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year,” he intoned gravely, “we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead”. The “decisive days” Bush spoke of dealt with the decision he had already made to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, for the purpose of removing the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from power.

Regime change had been the cornerstone policy of the United States toward Iraq ever since Bush 43’s father, Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and demanded Nuremberg-like justice for the crime of invading Kuwait. “Hitler revisited,” the elder Bush told a crowd at a Republican fundraiser in Dallas, Texas.

“But remember: When Hitler’s war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials”

American politicians, especially presidents seeking to take their country into war, cannot simply walk away from such statements. As such, even after driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait in February 1991, Bush could not rest so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power–the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler had to go.

The Bush 41 administration put in place UN-backed sanctions on Iraq designed to strangle the nation’s economy and promote regime change from within. These sanctions were linked to Iraq’s obligation to be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction capabilities, including long-range missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs.

Until Iraq was certified as being disarmed by UN weapons inspectors, the sanctions would remain in place. But as Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, made clear, these sanctions would never be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from power. “We are not interested,” Baker said on May 20, 1991, “in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power”.

Despite the sanctions, Saddam Hussein outlasted the administration of Bush 41. Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, continued the policy of sanctioning Iraq, combining them with UN weapons inspections to undermine Saddam Hussein. In June 1996, the Clinton administration used the UN weapons inspections process as a front to mount a coup against Saddam. The effort failed, but not the policy. In 1998, Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq an official policy of the United States.

Saddam outlasted the Clinton administration as well. But, when it came to implementing US regime change plans in Iraq, the third time proved to be the charm–Saddam’s fate was sealed when Bush 41’s son, George W. Bush, was elected president in 2001. While Clinton had failed to remove Saddam Hussein from power, he did succeed in killing the UN inspection effort to oversee the disarmament of Iraq, allowing the US to continue to claim Iraq was not complying with its obligation to disarm, and therefore justify the continuation of economic sanctions.

This is where the issue becomes personal. From 1991 until 1998, I served as one of the senior UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, overseeing Iraq’s disarmament. It was my inspection team that the CIA tried to use, in June 1996, to help launch a coup against Saddam, and it was the continued interference of the US in the work of my inspections teams that prompted my resignation from the UN in August 1998. A few months after I departed, the Clinton administration ordered UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq before initiating a bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox.

“Most of the targets bombed during Operation Desert Fox had nothing to do with weapons manufacturing,” I wrote in my book, Frontier Justice, published in 2003.

“Ninety-seven ‘strategic’ targets were struck during the seventy-two hour campaign; eighty-six were solely related to the security of Saddam Hussein–palaces, military barracks, security installations, intelligence schools, and headquarters. Without exception, every one of these sites had been subjected to UNSCOM inspectors (most of these inspections had been led by me), and their activities were well-known and certified as not being related to UNSCOM”

I concluded by noting that “The purpose of Operation Desert Fox was clear to all familiar with these sites: Saddam Hussein, not Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was the target.” Following these air strikes, the Iraqis kicked the UN inspectors out for good.

This, of course, was the goal of the US all along. Now, with a new administration in power, the US was seeking to use the uncertainty about the status of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs as leverage with the American people, and the world, in order to justify an invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power once and for all. By the fall of 2002, it was clear we were a nation heading for war.

I took this personally and decided to take action to prevent it. I went to Congress and tried to get the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees to hold genuine hearings about Iraq. They refused. The only way to prevent the invasion was to get the inspectors back in to Iraq so they could demonstrate that the country was not a threat worthy of war, but the Iraqis were putting up so many preconditions that it just wasn’t going to happen.

I then decided to intervene as a private citizen. I met with Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s advisor and former Foreign Minister, in South Africa, and told him I needed to speak to Iraq’s National Assembly publicly, without my words being edited or vetted. That was the only way to have them let the inspectors back in. At first, Aziz said I was crazy. After two days of discussion, he agreed.

I spoke to the Iraqi National Assembly. For that alone, people have accused me of treason, even though in that speech, I cut the Iraqis no slack and held them accountable for the crimes they had committed. I warned them that they were about to be invaded and that their only option was to let the inspectors back in.

Having broadcast that, the Iraqi government had to deal with me. I met with the vice president, the foreign minister, the oil minister, and the president’s science advisor. Five days later, they convinced Saddam Hussein to let weapons inspectors back into Iraq without preconditions. I count this as one of the highlights of my life.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Yes, UN inspectors returned, but their work was undermined at every turn by the US, which sought to discredit their findings. Now, on that fateful evening on January 28, 2003, the President stepped forward to complete the mission–to make a case for war on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq and its unaccounted-for WMD.

This was not a new debate. In fact, I had been trying to debunk this sort of argument ever since the US ordered UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq in December 1998. In June 2000, at the behest of Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and a critical member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had put my case down in writing, publishing a long article in Arms Control Today which was then distributed to every member of Congress. In 2001, I had made a documentary film, In Shifting Sands, in an effort to reach out to the American public about the truth regarding Iraqi WMD, the status of their disarmament, and the inadequacy of the US case for war.

Nonetheless, here was the President of the United States, taking advantage of his Constitutional obligation to inform Congress, promulgating a case for war built on a foundation of lies.

“Almost three months ago,” Bush declared, “the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm [note: this is after I helped convince Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors to return without precondition]. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations and for the opinion of the world”.
Bush observed that Iraq had failed to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, noting that “it was up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened”.

Iraq had declared that it had no WMD left, and as such was in no position to show anyone where it was hiding non-existent weapons. In fact, the UN weapons inspectors, working in full cooperation with the Iraqi government, had debunked the intelligence provided by the US alleging Iraqi non-compliance. The US was operating on principles dating back to James Baker’s May 1991 declaration that sanctions would not be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from power.

The President went on to articulate specific claims about unaccounted-for anthrax and botulinum toxin biological agents. He made similar claims about Sarin, mustard and VX chemical weapons.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb,” the President said.

This was true – I was one of the inspectors at the center of tracking down Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambition. But then the President went on to utter 16 words that would go down in infamy: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

CIA Director George Tenet was later compelled to admit before Congress that “these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” As Tenet later noted, while the assertion regarding the existence of British intelligence was correct, the CIA itself did not have confidence in the report. “This [the existence of British intelligence] did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches,” Tenet said, “and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed”.

The fact of the matter is that the entire case made by President Bush about Iraq was a lie, and the CIA was complicit in helping the President promulgate that lie. The sole purpose of this lie was to engender fear among Congress and the American people that Iraq, and especially its leader, Saddam Hussein, was a threat worthy of war.

“Year after year,” Bush intoned, “Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation,” Bush said, answering his own question, “the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack”.

“With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region”.

“And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own”.

“Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained”.

“Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known”.

“We will do everything in our power, to make sure that that day never comes”.

The President then got down to the crux of his presentation on Iraq. “The United States will ask the UN Security Council to convene on February the 5th [2003] to consider the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State [Colin] Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.”

The President stared into the camera, addressing the American people directly. “We will consult,” he said, “but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him”.

I stared back at the television screen, sick to my stomach. The President’s speech was composed of lies. All lies.

I had expended every ounce of my energy trying in vain to debunk these lies, but to no avail. My country was on the verge of going to war on the basis of words I knew to be false, and there was nothing more I could do to prevent it.

Credits : Mr Scott Ritter
- A former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 served as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq. Mr Ritter currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation
Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, hosted an annual press conference on Wednesday

Washington ruined relations with Moscow in its push to dominate in Europe, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Now, even the written commitments of the US and its allies cannot be trusted, he added.

The senior Russian diplomat spoke to journalists on Wednesday about Russian foreign policy, the possible resolution of the crisis in Ukraine, and opposition to what his nation perceives as a colonialist approach by the US to world affairs.

1. Military action in Ukraine justified

• The goals of the Russian military operation in Ukraine were “not invented” and instead are based “on core, legitimate security interests,” and the nation “cannot” simply stop pursuing them, Lavrov stated.
   
  Ukraine, just like any other Russian neighbor, must host no “military infrastructure directly threatening our nation,” he asserted. There also must be no “discrimination, persecution of our compatriots who happened to become citizens of the Ukrainian state” and want to preserve their ethnic Russian roots.
   
  In 2021, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky called Ukrainians sanctioned by his government “specimens” and told people in Donbass who cherish their Russian ethnicity to leave, Lavrov recalled.

2. No meaningful proposal on talks with Kiev

• Kiev is not free to decide its own foreign policy, so talking to the Ukrainian government makes no sense, Lavrov said. Western nations are seeking to inflict more damage on Russia by arming Ukraine and prolonging hostilities, which are part of a larger proxy war against Moscow.
   
  He described as “nonsense” the notion that other nations must not say “a word about Ukraine without Ukraine.” In reality, “the West decides for Ukraine,” the foreign minister argued.
   
  Russia would “react to any serious proposal” for overcoming the crisis, Lavrov pledged, but none has been set out so far.

3. Biden asked for meeting of top spies

• The November meeting between the heads of the CIA and the SVR, two prominent foreign intelligence agencies in the US and Russia respectively, happened at the request of US President Joe Biden, Lavrov revealed. The US leader asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for the meeting, he said.
   
  CIA Director William Burns and SVR head Sergey Naryshkin met in Türkiye, but the US official didn’t say anything beyond Washington’s public stance, as is typical for “sporadic” US-Russian contacts, Lavrov remarked. Nevertheless, it had some value.
   
  It is the US whose policies have ruined bilateral relations with Russia, and it’s up to Washington to fix them, the diplomat added. “We will not be running after them saying ‘Let’s be friends again,’” he said.

4. No business as usual with West

• Russia has had enough of deception by the US and its allies and simply cannot trust them anymore, Lavrov stated.
   
  NATO’s expansion in Europe is one example, he said, asserting that this went against both the promises given to the Soviet leadership and pledges to uphold indivisible security on the continent by the US-led bloc. The same was true for the Minsk agreements, which Ukraine, Germany and France apparently signed in bad faith, he said.
   
  He listed several other international treaties, which he suggested “the West never intended to implement.”
   
  “They simply lied to our face when presidents and prime ministers solemnly signed commitments,” the minister said.

5. Washington has colonialist mentality

• Washington has a colonialist attitude towards other nations in the sense that it seeks to subjugate them one way or another, and exploit their resources for its own benefit, the Russian diplomat said.
   
  He mentioned as an example a bill introduced in the US Congress, which seeks to create a strategy to “counter the malign influence and activities” of Russia in Africa.
   
  “I believe that in their heart, even those who wouldn’t comment on American provocations such as this one are convinced that this [proposed] law hurts Africans first and foremost,” Lavrov said. The document shows “colonialist mentality in a new dimension.”

6. Three most important words

• A journalist asked Lavrov which three words he would call “the most tragic and the most hopeful” for diplomacy last year, and “the one that the entire world should hear now.”
   
  The foreign minister seemed amused by the request for poetic commentary and remarked that his department usually dealt with “concrete matters” but agreed to answer anyway.
   
  He picked “war” as the most tragic word, because the crisis in Ukraine “is our response… to the hybrid war that was unleashed upon us and under the banner of which the West is promoting its agenda.” The word “victory” is appropriate for the two other categories, he added.

Why Moscow’s and Washington’s positions on how to manage atomic weapons are fraught with mistrust, unpredictability and volatility

During the Cold War, Moscow and Washington managed to agree on arms control regardless of the degree of their involvement in regional conflicts, whether in Europe or in Afghanistan. In the case of Ukraine, the situation is different: one of the side effects of the deployment of Russian troops in the country has been the freezing of these negotiations between Russia and the US.

The process of drawing up new agreements in this field, launched in 2021, has been stopped. The last of the existing bilateral treaties on strategic offensive arms is facing serious problems. In the meantime, the breakdown of arms control will lead to more mistrust, unpredictability and instability.

A step forward…

In the area of strategic stability, 2022 started well overall. On January 26, the US responded to security demands issued by Russia, and although Washington refused to provide guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO or to withdraw the bloc’s forces to 1997 positions, in the area of strategic stability the US was clearly in favour of compromise.

The American response indicated that they were willing to negotiate on a number of topics that Russia had been unsuccessfully pushing for over the previous few years. The most prominent example: Moscow’s 2019 proposal for a moratorium on the deployment of land-based intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe.

Before last January, the US and its NATO allies had publicly labelled the Russian initiative as “unacceptable and untrustworthy.”

However, Washington's response to Moscow's demands explicitly stated that the Americans had agreed to negotiate on the issue.

Moreover, the letter specified that the US was ready to discuss a transparency mechanism with Russia to verify the absence of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Aegis Ashore sites in Romania and Poland, provided that Moscow provided reciprocal transparency conditions for two selected land-based missile bases on its territory.
Earlier, the Russian side itself had proposed similar verification measures, but Moscow’s suggestion was only listened to against the background of its December 2021 ultimatum on Ukraine and its concentration of troops on the Ukrainian border.

In its January response, the US also indicated a willingness to explore the possibility of expanding the exercise notification regime and measures to reduce nuclear danger, including with regard to strategic atomic weapons-carrying bomber aircraft. In addition, the message from Washington indicated a willingness on the US side to discuss with Russia, differences on conventional arms control and additional measures to prevent dangerous incidents at sea and in the air.

Although Russian officials had described these U.S. proposals as “secondary” to Russia's central demands for NATO non-proliferation and the withdrawal of the bloc’s infrastructure in central and eastern Europe, many observers had the impression that Moscow was simply bargaining. Not in a particularly elegant way, but very effectively, as it looked to strengthen its negotiating position.
All the more so since Russian officials had assured the world that no “invasion” of Ukraine was planned, and the Russian Foreign Ministry had expressed the hope – as early as mid-February – that “together” Russia and NATO member states could achieve “a good result across the whole package [of issues]”

The feeling that Russia wouldn’t try to resolve the “Ukrainian issue” by force and the belief that arms control was a foreign policy priority for Moscow gave rise to cautious optimism. It seemed that the troops were about to be withdrawn as promised and an intensive negotiation process was about to begin between the two powers.

The basis for this belief already existed: during their meeting in Geneva in June 2021, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden had launched a “dialogue on strategic stability” aimed at working out new bilateral agreements to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expires in 2026. As part of this process, the two delegations managed to hold two rounds of face-to-face talks. The results were modest but encouraging.

...and two backwards

However, following Moscow's recognition of the independence of the Donbass and Lugansk People’s Republics, and then the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine, those hopes were dashed. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who had planned to meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on 24 February, said that he no longer saw the point.
The US quickly suspended its participation in a bilateral “strategic stability dialogue.” The positive aspects of the December-February correspondence were no longer mentioned. Against the backdrop of the hostilities in Ukraine, everything faded into the background.

This was the case for about six months, but around August, Washington began signalling a readiness to return to discussing arms control with Moscow.

This was stated in particular by President Joe Biden in his address to the Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Recalling that “even at the peak of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to work together to maintain common responsibility and ensure strategic stability,” the American leader declared: “My Administration is ready to expeditiously negotiate a new arms control framework to replace New START when it expires in 2026.”

Joe Biden, however, conditioned the resumption of negotiations on a number of vaguely worded demands on Russia in the context of Ukraine:

“But negotiations require a bona fide partner. And Russiaʼs brutal and unprovoked aggression in Ukraine disturbed the peace in Europe and is an attack on the fundamental principles of the international order. In this context, Russia must demonstrate that it is ready to resume nuclear arms control work with the United States.”

Moscow felt that since the “dialogue on strategic stability” had been interrupted at the initiative of the US, it should ask for its resumption, rather than making demands.

Dmitry Medvedev, who signed the START Treaty with the US when he was president in 2010, had the harshest words for the American position.

“Let them come running or crawling themselves and ask for it (the resumption of negotiations on strategic stability). And they will appreciate it as a special mercy. Otherwise it looks like this: they give us all kinds of abominations, and we give them a nuclear deal,” he wrote in his Telegram channel.

“Unproductive, dangerous, and looks like a display of weakness. Let them appreciate such a dialogue for real and ask for it in all the streets and in the back alleys.”

The idea of Moscow and Washington returning to the pre-conflict state-of-affairs did not work out so well.

A mirror response

At the same time, START has run into serious problems. On August 8, Russia announced it was temporarily withdrawing its facilities from treaty inspections, accusing the US of trying to resume on-site visits without obtaining the Russian side's approval.

At the same time, comments by Russian officials initially suggested that the main obstacle to the START inspections was the practical implications of the confrontation between Russia and the US over Ukraine. That is, sanctions. “We are talking about the absence of normal air traffic due to the fault of the West, ignoring our requests to confirm the possibility for our planes to fly with inspectors through the airspace of transit countries, visa problems in transit, [and] difficulties with making payments for services during inspections,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov explained in August.

mechanism under the START Treaty, was called to resolve the disagreement between Moscow and Washington on the issue of inspections.

At the same time, Russia has accumulated its own complaints against the US under this treaty. In October, Moscow once again made it clear that, in its view, Washington was not fully complying with its requirements. At issue was the possible reversibility of the conversion of US submarine and heavy bomber ballistic missile launchers.
Russia assumes that the US, in withdrawing its submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers from the treaty, is doing so in a way that would make them nuclear-armed again at any time. In previous contacts the sides have considered a number of mutually acceptable solutions to this problem, but it has not yet been possible to test them in practice.

It was agreed to discuss the backlog of issues from November 29 to December 6. Previously, similar meetings were held in Geneva. However, Moscow no longer considers Switzerland, which has joined most of the Western sanctions imposed on Russia, to be a neutral state and does not want to have contacts with third parties on its territory. Therefore, a new location was chosen for the meeting of the bilateral consultative commission: Cairo.

The delegations of the two countries were already packing their suitcases when they learned that the meeting had been postponed indefinitely at the initiative of Moscow.

The explanations given by Russian officials made it clear that the problem was not the START Treaty, but the confrontation around Ukraine.

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, the decision was made “taking into account the extremely negative situation in Russian-American relations, which was created by Washington and continues to steadily degrade.” According to the diplomat, this situation “could not fail to affect the sphere of arms control, which cannot be seen as something autonomous and existing in isolation from geopolitical realities”.

“It takes a very peculiar logic to tell Russia about restraint, transparency and predictability in military matters while helping the Kiev regime to kill our military and civilians in Russian regions by providing increasingly destructive means of armed struggle and sending American instructors, advisers and mercenaries to Ukraine," Zakarova said.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, said the same in an interview with TASS a little later. "You cannot isolate the issue of convening a meeting of the bilateral consultative commission on the START Treaty from the general state of Russian-American relations. There is a war being waged against us.
The adversary is seeking a strategic defeat for Russia. There are attempts to rock the domestic political and economic situation. And under these circumstances, we should allow Americans to visit the holy of holies – the security system of the Russian Federation – namely, military bases, where nuclear deterrent forces are deployed, as if nothing had happened?"

The Russian Foreign Ministry said it expected “a good-faith effort on the part of the US to create the conditions for a bilateral consultative commission session in 2023 and a return to full implementation of all treaty provisions.”

Thus, Moscow essentially mirrored Washington's February decision to suspend the “strategic stability dialogue” by making arms control issues contingent on the conflict over Ukraine. Even the conditions for resuming contacts were formulated similarly by the Russian side. Washington urged Moscow to become a “good faith partner” and it urged Moscow to make “good faith efforts.”

Not on a counter course

When the bilateral consultative commission for the START Treaty will now meet in person and what will happen on the outstanding issues, including inspections, is not at all clear. If Moscow insists as a condition that Washington change its foreign policy course, including the cessation of American military assistance to Kiev, then neither consultations on the treaty nor inspections will take place for the foreseeable future.

Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Moscow’s First Channel, late last month, that Russia had conveyed to the US that it was “fully committed to its obligations under the treaty as far as they can be implemented on an equal basis.”

“We will provide them with the information stipulated in the treaty in a timely manner and in full scope and send appropriate notifications,” Mr. Lavrov clarified.

However, the mere remote exchange of information and notifications of launches may not be enough for the US. There have already been statements in Washington that Russia’s word cannot be trusted, and that without on-site inspections the treaty is not in the US national interest.
The State Department's annual report on compliance with international arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements is about to begin. If on-site inspections under the START Treaty are not resumed (and by the end of June 2023, the Americans would like to conduct the maximum number of inspections stipulated by the agreement) and no commission meeting is held, it is possible that the next report will say that Russia is not fully complying with the treaty.

This, in turn, could lead to Congress introducing an amendment to prohibit the allocation of funds for cooperation with Russia under the START Treaty, i.e. effectively demanding a suspension of the treaty until Russia resumes cooperation. Or Joe Biden’s administration itself could take such a step. If the US does not comply with the START Treaty, Russia could also renege on its commitments altogether.

In such a case, the key – and indeed last – US-Russian arms control treaty would become ineffective or collapse.

The lack of agreement in this area has three negative consequences.

Even greater mistrust: in implementing the treaties, the military and diplomats of the two countries communicated regularly and in person, which strengthened personal ties and mutual understanding.

More unpredictability: in the absence of ceilings and frameworks, each side will likely overestimate the potential of the other and base its planning on worst-case scenarios.

Extra volatility: This is virtually inevitable in an intensified arms race not covered by any treaty.

Credits : Elena Chernenko
- A special correspondent at the Kommersant daily newspaper in Moscow

As NATO’s tensions with Russia and China show no sign of abating, people across the world become increasingly worried over the threat of the alliance being involved in a nuclear confrontation with Moscow or Beijing. Does NATO have Nukes? If so, how many? Which member-states have nuclear weapons? Sputnik gives you the answers.

What is NATO's Current Nuclear Stockpile?

At the moment, NATO possesses a total of 5,943 nuclear warheads. Some research companies, meanwhile, remain at odds over the total number of NATO nukes, mainly referring to the so-called operational number of warheads.

One western media outlet, for instance, cites about 4,178 operational nuclear warheads that the alliance possessed in 2022.

According to Statista, in 2012 the figure stood at 5,406, a far cry from the number of NATO nuclear warheads registered in 2002 (11,087) and 1992 (14,498). In 1972, the alliance reportedly had a total of 27,009 nukes – the biggest figure that has been registered by Statista since 1952.  

Which NATO Countries Have Nukes?

Nuclear weapons are currently possessed by three NATO allies: the United States, United Kingdom and France. The US possesses the lion's share of all nukes.  

How Many Nukes Does the US Have?

Currently, there are 5,428 nuclear warheads on at least 652 delivery vehicles in the US, including 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles and 14 nuclear-capable Ohio-class Trident submarines, Pentagon data indicates. The currently deployed number of the US nuclear warheads stands at 1,350.

According to the Washington-based non-profit organization Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the number comprises an estimated 100 nuclear warheads that the US stored across Europe on air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, in line with the so-called principle of NATO nuclear sharing.  

What About the UK's Nuclear Arsenal?

A US news outlet argued that Britain currently possesses a total of 225 nuclear warheads.

The number includes more than 100 warheads that can be part of arms of the British Vanguard-class nuclear-powered submarines.  

Does France Outstrip UK in Terms of Nukes' Number?

There are about 290 nuclear weapons in France, which is capable of launching nukes from submarines or using missiles dropped from an aircraft, according to the global civil society coalition International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

The coalition argued that France spent an estimated $5.9 billion to build and maintain its nuclear forces in 2021.  

What is NATO Nuclear Sharing?

According to NATO’s official website, nuclear sharing is the alliance’s “arrangements” ensuring that “the benefits, responsibilities and risks of nuclear deterrence are shared across” the whole of NATO.

In line with the concept, the US “has deployed a limited number of B-61 nuclear weapons to certain locations in Europe, which remain under US custody and control in full compliance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

The concept came to the fore late last week, when Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto announced that his country would not house nuclear weapons on its territory even after joining NATO.

This was preceded by Stockholm and Helsinki making it clear in November 2022 that they don’t exclude deploying US nukes on their soil, if, of course, both Sweden and Finland join NATO.

"We shouldn't [make] any preconditions. This isn't something that we are actively now discussing. We are waiting to become members and then these kinds of matters can be discussed," Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told reporters at the time.

Her Swedish counterpart Ulf Kristersson stressed that Stockholm shares Helsinki’s approach to the issue of deploying nukes on the two countries’ soil.

"We'll go hand-in-hand, also in this sense, with Finland. And of course, we acknowledge the fact that we embrace all of NATO's capabilities, as NATO is today. But I think Sweden and Finland should draw exactly the same conclusions," Kristersson said.

The remarks came after Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized earlier last year that Moscow has no problems with Finland and Sweden, and that the possible expansion of NATO at the expense of these two countries does not pose an “immediate threat" to Russia. He, however, warned that Moscow would respond in kind to the NATO enlargement.

“The expansion of military infrastructure to this territory of Finland and Sweden will certainly cause our response, which will be based on the threats that will be posed against us. Actually, the problem is being created from scratch, and we will react accordingly to this,” Putin stressed.

When Can NATO Use Nuclear Weapons?

The possibility of NATO using nuclear weapons was mentioned by the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in October 2022, when he singled out the topic in light of Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine.

“Circumstances in which NATO might have to resort to nuclear weapons are extremely remote," he argued, accusing Russia of issuing “reckless” rhetoric related to what he claims was Moscow’s drive to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

“They also know that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought,” Stoltenberg added.

Russia has repeatedly underlined that Moscow does not threaten anyone with nuclear weapons, with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov telling Sputnik in November that the goal of western countries’ bellicose remarks is to make the global community believe that Moscow is purportedly preparing to launch a tactical nuclear strike on Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, warned that a nuclear war threat is growing and that Moscow does not want to be "brandishing" its nukes around the world.

Credits : Oleg Burunov
- A correspondent who specialises in foreign affairs and defence

All the key players in the current conflict spent years kidding themselves, and peace will only come when they accept reality

The Russian military offensive in Ukraine has set in motion a chain of events that has led to a global upheaval – in political and economic terms – comparable to world wars. We are probably in the initial phase of this conflict, and more players will become involved over time, but some conclusions can already be drawn.

The past year has been one in which postmodernism collided with the real world. Almost all of the direct and indirect actors in the Ukrainian crisis built their domestic and foreign policies on theoretical, highly ideological constructions. And the more the wishful thinking, the tougher the consequences now.

Let's take a look at the main players.  

Russia

Our first and foremost illusion was about the contractual commitments of other parties. All through the post-Soviet era we had tried to resolve the Ukraine issue peacefully on the assumption that this would be better for all.

The idea was that the West – especially the part bordering the leading nuclear power – would get a predictable security situation and clear rules of the game, together with a high degree of influence over Kiev. Western Europe would, in addition, preserve and strengthen its ties with Russia as its main resource base and also gain access to its extensive market. Ukraine would have the possibility of a soft integration into greater Europe while maintaining deep economic and cultural ties with Russia.
Meanwhile Moscow, apart from its further gradual integration into the Western and primarily EU-led system, would maintain influence over Ukraine and enjoy the guarantee of friendly policies from Kiev towards both the Russian state and the multi-million ethnic Russian population in Ukraine.

However, the entire history of post-Soviet Ukraine is a history of backward movement (which will be discussed below). This state of affairs has been irreversible since 2014, and the consistent ignoring of this fact and attempts to override the inevitable process – via agreements with Kiev and the West – have led us to the current military campaign.

What exactly went wrong at the end of February last year is something we will not know for some time. However, if Moscow had the goal of solving the Ukrainian problem according to the 2008 Georgian scenario – with little blood and within a few days – this objective has obviously not been achieved.

The fact is that the 30-year old anti-Russian outpost turned out to be very strong and ready to fight even at the cost of its own destruction – again, contrary to common sense, as it is understood in Moscow.

Hopefully, Russian illusions have been dispelled definitively and our political and military leadership is no longer relying on rational behaviour from both the West and Kiev. However, so far, the course of the military offensive suggests rather the opposite.

Right now, offensives are being carried out only in the Donbass, and not along the entire front, but in localised areas – mainly by the forces of the Wagner private contractor group and the former local militias. There is a sense that during 2022 we didn’t really know what to do next, as if we were waiting for the enemy to get fed up before we did, and finally start to negotiate for real.

Our second illusion concerned the combat capabilities of the army. The actions of the Russian Armed Forces are generally criticized in patriotic circles. But it should be understood that, for some time now, our army has not prepared for a large-scale land conflict with a front line of a couple of thousand kilometres, with the need to conduct combined armed operations on the level of World War Two, backed up by the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men. This will not change overnight.
And although the shortcomings identified in the actions of their Armed Forces, and their leadership, are recognized and somehow being addressed, we do not yet see a full-scale offensive with the decisive goal of defeating the Ukrainian Army. Perhaps we will this year. Perhaps the army is just now preparing rather than waiting.  

USA

The main illusion of the US in the post-Cold War era has been a belief in its complete control (or at least dominance) over what goes on in the world, and hence the notion that the interests of its counterparts is determined in Washington, and only in Washington. Put simply, things will be as I want them to be, and if not, I have sufficient means to cajole and punish those who disagree.

In many ways, this inflexibility has led to the current crisis: it was impossible for US elites to reach an agreement with Russia – while saving face and even benefiting economically and politically. Even though Moscow seemed prepared to compromise.

The situation is similar all over the world: everywhere the United States acts on the principle of “Might goes before right.”

In the Middle East, such behaviour has already led to a sharp weakening of America’s position; the prospect of conflict with China has become almost irreversible, and Washington has laid time bombs under its relations with allies in Europe and Asia that are likely to go off in the coming years.

Since the Second World War, the United States had been building a global system, a kind of new type of empire. Washington has consistently taken control of political and economic processes in the world without much resistance – on the contrary, everyone has sought to integrate into this system, some gaining markets and access to cheap money, some obtaining a security umbrella and an opportunity not to spend money on their armies, some getting their hands on the latest technology.

The US itself skimmed the cream off all this, and after several generations the American political class became convinced that such a system was not the result of painstaking work and consideration of partners’ interests, but some kind of birthright, which at times became a burden. Hence, the more hysterical American foreign policy has become and the more it has attempted to force others to bend to its will. Consequently, it has undermined the global US-centric system.

Washington still has a solid margin of safety, its base remains large, and alternative global institutions are only just beginning to take shape, so do not expect any noticeable change in US policy in the coming years, especially as internal divides are more likely to increase the foreign policy strain.

The second American (as well as Western European) illusion is that a military conflict, on the scale of what’s happening in Ukraine, can be won without direct involvement. Yes, the Ukrainian military is holding up quite well, but Russia has so far engaged only a small part of its military resources in the operation, and the degree of escalation on our part is now determined by political decisions, not military and mobilization capabilities.
If we are willing and ready, we can increase the onslaught many times over, to which it will be extremely difficult for the West and the US to respond without directly engaging their forces (at least air defence and air force) in the conflict. However, President Biden has repeatedly stressed that he will not intervene as long as he’s in power.  

Western Europe

Western Europe's main illusion is that its well-fed prosperity of recent decades is its own achievement and that it’s based on a set of abstract values. In reality, its wealth has rested on two pillars: the American military, political and economic roof and cheap resources, primarily Russian.

A lack of concern about its own security and the impossibility of internal conflicts, on the one hand, contributed to an unprecedented economic boom, a true golden age, and on the other hand, led to the degeneration of Western European elites and the political class, who sincerely believed that this would always be the case and that all it took was cultivating values and striving to spread them to the rest of the “backward” world.

This explains Western Europe’s stubbornness on the Ukrainian issue – which borders on fanaticism. The EU, and its allies, accepts the most vicious anti-Russia sanctions with the greatest fervor, and with no regard for any damage.

The bloc is deprived of a major market, of its most important resource base, and is being driven into near-colonial dependence on Washington, which, unlike Western Europe, has real military power and control over political and economic processes globally.

Since the West's attempt to shock and awe Russia economically failed, Western Europe's leaders are at a loss: the same people, a couple of days apart, can talk about the need for a military victory over Moscow and the need for a diplomatic dialogue – without seeming to understand much about what “military victory” and “diplomatic dialogue” mean.

The prospect of years of high energy prices and the resulting de-industrialisation and falling living standards, the likelihood of a trade war with the US in a global recession, the possibility of subsidizing a ruined Ukraine for an indefinite number of years, the specter of hundreds of billions in losses from lost accumulated investments in Russia should be sobering, but have not yet led to any solutions. Because there is simply no one to make and implement them.

Plus, the long-standing problems of the EU, which it has brushed under the carpet in recent years – such as the migration crisis and the constant concern about southern Europe’s economic stability – remain.  

Ukraine

Ukraine's main illusion is the belief that it is possible to build a mono-ethnic state hostile to Russia within its post-Soviet borders with a significant Russian population, and the belief that such a Ukraine will be tolerable to both the West and Russia itself.

Ukraine is not Poland, and the attempt to tilt decisively to one bloc has led to a civil conflict, each side supported by the West and Russia respectively. After this conflict escalated into open conflict in 2014, Ukraine started to turn from an anti-Russian outpost into a weapon, a kind of kamikaze drone of the West against Moscow.

Admittedly, this was partly successful: both the Ukrainian armed forces and the state as a whole withstood the February blow, recovered, and with Western support, inflicted a series of painful defeats on Russia by the autumn.

The military successes, however, are not strategic, and the price is the death of the Ukrainian economy. According to various estimates, up to a third of the (pre-February 2022) population has fled the country. Meanwhile, production was cut in half even before the Russian strikes on energy facilities started in October, and by the New Year, according to official Kiev statements, it was down by 70 percent. This means unemployment, empty coffers, further impoverishment of the population and mass closures of businesses.

Yes, the West now serves as a powerful rear for Ukraine, at considerable cost, but it avoids getting directly involved in the fighting, shifting all the burden and hardship to Kiev. Whatever the end of the hot phase of the conflict, it appears that a devastated Ukraine will have to deal with the consequences on its own, and the further it goes on, the harder they will be.

However, even if some among the Ukrainian elites can guess how they are being used, they cannot stop. The Western control is too tight, the ideological pumping is too great and things have gone too far.

Ukraine is now a zombie, a dead man walking, and it will continue moving as long as the West supports it. Nevertheless, even as it is, the Ukrainian military is capable of fighting for years, especially given the current sluggish course of the conflict.

The West can withdraw support for Ukraine only in one scenario: if Kiev’s army is defeated and physically incapable of fighting, or if Ukraine physically shrinks enough to lose its strategic significance. Any ceasefire would only postpone the conflict for the future, and there should be no illusions about that.
 

The conflict has so far only escalated. For both Russia and the West it is existential, and neither side is inclined to compromise. All the more surprising is that the hostilities have so far been relatively localized, limited to one Ukrainian theatre, and even there in a measured and positional manner.
The parties seem to be focused on how to learn to live under the new conditions, which means that figuring out the new world order could happen relatively peacefully, without turning into major battle with the risk of a nuclear disaster.

The initiative in this process will be taken by whoever accepts reality first, understands their place in it, and acts accordingly. This applies not only to the above-mentioned participants in the Ukrainian crisis, but also to neutral countries that have yet to give up their own illusions.

Credits : Sergey Poletaev
- Co-founder and editor of the Vatfor project

Various governments across the world have co-opted digital tracing for use by police and intelligence services

New revelations show that the Covid pandemic has allowed for governments and Big Tech to expand the surveillance-industrial complex that tightens the state’s grip on thought and movement.

A recent batch of Twitter internal documents released by Elon Musk via journalist David Zweig on the platform itself reveals that one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative.

“Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing,” Zweig wrote.

He added that “with Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the non-scientists at Twitter as Covid “misinformation.”

We’ve also learned from previous Twitter file releases under Musk of the cozy relationship between government officials – including those working for the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI – and big US social media outlets like Twitter, which routinely cooperated on various government priorities and agendas ranging from framing of foreign wars to promoting certain narratives about geopolitical competitors (like Russia) under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” All of this in an ostensibly democratic country that’s supposed to value free speech and debate.

It’s only now, when most Westerners are jabbed, that taboos on scientific information about the true efficacy of the vaccines (particularly on new variants), associated side-effects and risks (like myocarditis), and the high protective value of post-infection immunity, are being loosened and no longer routinely suppressed or vilified as dangerous fake news.

Just like they do with war propaganda, the US government and its Western allies went out of their way to manufacture consent, and they used the very same Big Tech platforms that were once the great hope of those seeking to break free from more controlled corporate media. And the gatekeepers of those platforms, like those at Twitter, were far too keen to abide. Under the guise of combating disinformation, citizens ended up applauding censorship and descending in lynch mobs on those designated as the current threat to virtuous Western societal norms – be they “Russians” or “anti-vaxxers.”
 

From Covid tracking to mass surveillance

And that’s not all that the pandemic has in common with other crises shamelessly exploited by governments. A new report by the Associated Press has found that the pandemic permitted the expansion of global surveillance, with police in multiple countries using “technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies.”

According to the AP’s investigation, Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has used contact tracing technology to track people located near a zone of unrest, sending them threatening messages even if they weren’t involved.

China’s health QR code system, managed by three separate levels of government, has required that Covid passes flash green to take a plane or train, but those en route to protests have inexplicably and routinely found their passes turning red.

Authorities in India reportedly used the Covid mask mandate as a pretext to scan faces with hand-held devices using facial recognition software, which can be added or compared to a preexisting database of criminals.

The watchdogs for Australia’s intelligence services disclosed in November 2020 that the country’s Covid contact tracing app was used by the spies to collect data on citizens – “incidentally” – even though it was deemed to be virtually useless in uncovering unidentified Covid cases. But Aussie police have since used the Covid app’s check-in data as an investigative tool, according to the AP.

The US government has used CIA-linked data company, Palantir Technologies, to “power the digital operating system for the U.S. public health response to the pandemic,” according to a February 2022 press release from the company, which has been awarded multiple contracts worth tens of millions of dollars amid the crisis.

Remember when the global war on terror scared people so badly that US-led Western democracies, with little pushback, set up a global surveillance panopticon under the guise of keeping everyone safe? Well, the Covid scare has been used by governments all over the world to expand their surveillance networks – all the while telling their citizens that it’s being done to keep them safe from a virus.

It’s not like no one predicted this would happen. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression,” warned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in an April 2020 interview.
“We could have a parallel epidemic of authoritarian and repressive measures following close if not on the heels of a health epidemic,” said the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in April 2020, while referring to Covid as a “pathogen of repression.”

“Civil society can expect governments to justify using digital surveillance beyond the pandemic as a means to protect national security, implement governance priorities, and serve future public health interests,” the Cargenie Endowment for International Peace warned in October 2021.

Just a few days ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just retired as Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, lamented that “we’re living in a progressively anti-science era.” But if he is looking to place the blame for the blow that science has taken as a result, then he should do some soul-searching along with his government colleagues who chose manipulation and information control over open scientific discussion and debate.
And where are the demands for the Covid-related mass surveillance to be immediately dismantled? It shouldn’t just be forgotten about so that it can stick around to be exploited or further enhanced during the next big government authoritarian bender. It needs to go.

Credits : Rachel Marsden
- A columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.

##Budapest and Kiev have suffered exceptionally poor relations for nearly a decade, owing largely to discriminatory laws against the estimated 150,000-strong community of ethnic Hungarians living in the southwestern Ukrainian region of Zakarpattia.

The source of the “stormy relationship” between Hungary and successive Ukrainian governments since the 2014 Euromaidan coup is no mystery, and stems from the criminally underreported-on problem of ultra-nationalists holding Ukrainian politicians and politics hostage, a Hungarian columnist has observed.

Recalling that Hungary was only the third country in the world after Poland and Canada to recognize Ukraine’s independence after the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, observer Peter G. Feher explained that Budapest, for its part, did everything it could to get relations with its new neighbour off on the right foot.

Hungary was the very first nation to establish formal diplomatic relations with Kiev, with the two countries speedily setting up embassies in one another’s capitals, and signing a treaty on good neighbourliness and cooperation.

Dark Clouds on the Horizon

The columnist sees the origins of the downturn in ties in the Orange Revolution – 2004-2005 Western-backed protests in Ukraine following tense elections which culminated in a do-over which ousted President-elect Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with Viktor Yushchenko, who began pulling the heavily divided nation toward European integration and NATO membership.

The 2004 Orange Revolution, “aimed at democratizing Ukraine and removing the Soviet nomenklatura, also brought about an unexpected return” of political forces “that are still little known,” Feher wrote. “Taking advantage of the revolutionary atmosphere, old Ukrainian fascists and their descendants, who had supported the Nazi German armies during World War II, returned home, mainly from Canada and Australia. At the time, no one paid much attention to it, but things began to change, albeit slowly, in the wrong direction,” according to the observer.

Tens of thousands of veterans of the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainian and Russian acronym ‘UPA’) - the fascist paramilitary force founded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1942, and other collaborators fled west as the Red Army advanced through Ukraine and Eastern Europe between 1943 and 1945. After the war, many were granted citizenship in Western European countries, the United States and Canada. While they are lauded by the Ukrainian government today as “heroes” who fought for Ukrainian independence, the UPA’s estimated 100,000 fighters were historically dwarfed by the more than six million Ukrainians who served in the ranks of the Red Army during the Second World War, and who, until the collapse of the USSR and the 2004 and 2014 Maidan events, were considered the true heroes of Ukraine.

Feher recalled that even after Yushchenko was defeated and Yanukovych returned to become president in 2010, Hungary continued to support Ukraine’s drift toward the European Union – including visa-free travel, a free trade deal and an association agreement with the EU. “But the times changed, and Ukraine’s domestic politics became more and more hectic. President Yanukovych began to pull toward Moscow, causing strong tensions in Kiev. With quiet American help, the aforementioned Ukrainian Nazis emerged, mingling with neo-Nazis. Yanukovych was removed from power in a coup d’état,” the observer noted, emphasizing that these “far right” forces have been “holding the government in Kiev hostage ever since.”

“Since the madness of 2014, neo-Nazis have threatened anyone who does not share their views, and they have managed to subjugate all Ukrainian politics. Stepan Bandera, the founder of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who willingly served the German occupiers, and whose monuments are now erected in Ukraine’s public squares, is responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people,” Feher stressed.

The lionization of Bandera by the post-coup authorities in Kiev has been a major source of tensions between Ukraine and another of its neighbors – Poland. Upwards of 200,000 Polish civilians were killed at the hands of UPA nationalists in western Ukraine during WWII, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian anti-fascist partisans and civilians, and Red Army servicemen also killed fighting the insurgents, who continued their campaign well into the post-war period.

Unfortunately, Feher noted, Hungary “did not have to wait long” for the effects of the Banderization of Ukraine to paralyze Kiev with ultra-nationalism, with a 2017 education law, which called for the phasing out of minority languages from public education, “clearly intended to ‘push’ the Hungarian language out of Zakarpattia,” home to more than 150,000 ethnic Hungarians.

The 2017 law sparked protests, not only from Hungarian and Russian-speakers, but minority communities of Bulgarians, Romanians, and other Eastern European peoples who dot the vast country. Russian authorities called the education law an “act of ethnocide.”

“When Ukrainian President [Volodymyr] Zelensky came to power, he promised to change the situation, but new legislation put Hungarians at an even greater disadvantage,” Feher lamented, referring to a 2019 law "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language," which further restricted the use of minority languages and likened the idea of multilingualism to “actions aimed at the forcible change or overthrow of the constitutional order.”

“In response to anti-Hungarian sentiment, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in 2017: Ukraine stabbed Hungary in the back,” Feher concluded.

Credits : Ilya Tsukanov

Kiev is capable of building an atomic device, and its leaders often outline such thoughts

Last year, Western media and high-ranking politicians actively discussed the possibility of Russian troops using atomic weapons in Ukraine. There has even been speculation on the likelihood of a nuclear war breaking out. However, it could be said that the risk is probably a lot higher on the other side of the barricades.

Ukraine’s Atomic History

Ukraine was a nuclear state after the collapse of the USSR, when 1,700 active atomic warheads remained in the country. Its politicians of that time had the prudence to abandon this status. The weapons were taken to Russia under international control, and their means of delivery were destroyed. Ukraine’s missile silos, with the exception of one which is now a museum near Kiev, were blown up, while its strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons were either transferred to Russia or destroyed.

Despite this, there were still many nuclear specialists in Ukraine, as research into nuclear fission has been conducted in Kharkov since the 1930s. In addition, five nuclear power plants were built in Ukraine during the Soviet years: Zaporozhye, Rovno, Khmelnitsky, and South-Ukrainian, as well as the infamous Chernobyl, where an accident involving a power unit led to an explosion that spewed radioactive fallout throughout Europe.

In addition, uranium is extracted at a deposit in Ukraine’s Kirovograd Region and enriched at a plant in the city of Zheltye Vody. In the 2010s, there were plans with Russia’s Rosatom to build a plant in Ukraine that would produce fuel for nuclear power stations. However, these were abandoned after the Maidan coup in 2014, when the country adopted an adversarial stance towards Russia.

At present, three of Ukraine’s five original nuclear power plants remain under its control. Chernobyl, which continued to generate electricity even after the 1986 accident, was finally decommissioned in 2020, while Zaporozhye, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, has been guarded by Russian troops since last year. It is currently being run by Rosatom but does not produce electricity, largely for safety reasons. This is due to regular rocket and artillery attacks by Ukrainian troops, which have damaged numerous pieces of auxiliary equipment.

Push to Reobtain Nuclear Weapons

It should be noted that not everyone in Ukraine was happy that the country gave up its nuclear weapons. Ukrainian politicians have often failed to hide the fact that their dream of reobtaining nuclear weapons is not so much connected with their country’s security, as the desire to dictate their will to the rest of the world. Radical Ukrainian nationalists were particularly dissatisfied with the abandonment of the country’s nuclear status, and many of their manifestos contain a clause calling for it to be restored.

For example, “the return of nuclear weapons” is specifically cited as a goal in paragraph 2 of the Military Doctrine section in the program statement of the Patriot of Ukraine Organization, while paragraph 7 of its Foreign Policy section reads: “The ultimate goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination.” Patriot of Ukraine was created in 2014 by the notorious Andrey Biletsky, who formed it based on the ideology of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and had dreamed of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons as far back as 2007.

In 2009, the Ternopil Regional Council, which was then dominated by Oleg Tianibok’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (called the Social-National Party until 2004), demanded that Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and head of the Verkhovna Rada “terminate the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and retore Ukraine’s nuclear status.”

Ukraine’s longing for an atomic bomb especially increased after February 2014. In an interview with USA Today in March of that year, Ukrainian MP Pavel Rizanenko called Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons a “big mistake.” And that was not just the opinion of one MP.
Just a few days later, representatives of the Batkivshchyna party, headed by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, and UDAR, headed by Kiev’s current mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, including the secretary of the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Sergey Kaplin, submitted a bill on withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty. Kaplin claimed that Ukraine could create nuclear weapons in just two years because it already had almost everything necessary: The fissile materials, equipment (except centrifuges), technology, specialists, and even means of delivery.
In September of the same year, Ukraine’s minister of defense, Valery Geletey, also expressed the desire to develop nuclear weapons.

In December 2018, the former representative of the Ukrainian mission to NATO, Major General Pyotr Garashchuk, announced the real possibility of Ukraine creating its own nuclear weapons. In 2019, Aleksandr Turchinov, who usurped power in Ukraine in February of 2014, called Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear weapons a “historic mistake.” Following him, in April 2021, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrey Melnik, stated that if the West did not help Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia, the country would launch a nuclear program and create an atomic bomb. And on February 19, 2022, before the start of Russia’s special military operation, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky announced at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine has the right to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, which proclaimed the country’s nuclear-free status.

Perhaps the most striking statement by a Ukrainian politician was made by David Arakhamia, the head of the Ukrainian parliament’s ruling parliamentary faction, Servant of the People. “We could blackmail the whole world, and we would be given money to service (nuclear weapons), as is happening in many other countries now,” he said in mid-2021.

Range of Possibilities

Is Ukraine technically capable of creating an atomic bomb? Absolutely. Yes, enriching uranium-235 to the purity necessary to set off a chain reaction would cost a lot, primarily to create centrifuges for separating isotopes. However, though this may be the most effective way to separate isotopes, it’s not the only one. The first American bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created without the use of this technology.

In addition, it should not be forgotten that there are not only uranium, but also plutonium bombs. Breeder reactors are used to synthesize this chemical element, most often using heavy-water reactor technology, and research reactors are capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. There is presently a nuclear research installation at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, and a VVR-M reactor suitable for plutonium production at the Institute for Nuclear Research of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. Until March 2022, there was a US-built facility in Kharkov that could produce isotopes by irradiating the starting materials with a powerful neutron flux, which could also be used to develop fissile materials for a bomb.

In addition, Ukraine has the technical capability to create a nuclear weapon based on uranium-233, rather than uranium-235, which is usually used. A similar bomb was tested by the US in 1955 during Operation Teapot, and its power was comparable to that of the Fat Man bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. To obtain uranium-233, it is enough to replace one of the fuel assemblies of a conventional nuclear power plant reactor with a thorium-232 cassette, a supply of which is located near Mariupol, a city that was fiercely defended by Ukrainian nationalists from the Azov regiment earlier this year.

There is another indirect sign that both uranium and plutonium versions of nuclear weapons have been secretly developed at the direction of the post-Maidan authorities. At the beginning of 2021, Ukraine completely banned the export of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to Russia, as was required by an agreement on its supply by Rosatom. SNF, among other things, is a source of weapons-grade plutonium, which can be isolated from fuel cells that have been in a nuclear power plant reactor.

#Nuclear Power on the Brink of Disaster Just as dangerous is the nuclear power policy pursued by the Ukrainian government.

Ukraine inherited five nuclear power plants with 18 active reactors from the USSR. Three of them located at the Chernobyl NPP were decommissioned by 2000. Five of the six reactors at the Zaporozhye NPP, three of the four reactors at the Rovno NPP, one of the two reactors at the Khmelnitsky NPP, and all three reactors at the South Ukraine NPP have exceeded their original lifespans and received extensions of their operating lives for another 10 to 15 years. The license extensions have sometimes been granted with violations of existing regulations since, after 2015, Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate stopped cooperating with Russian vendors and has not overhauled reactor vessels, which become brittle after prolonged exposure to neutron radiation. Back in 2015, independent experts noted the critical condition of Reactor 1 of the South Ukraine NPP, which, nevertheless, has had its service life extended until 2025.

Ukraine’s Union of Veterans of Nuclear Energy and Industry sent a warning letter to the government in April 2020, arguing that the country’s nuclear energy sector was faced with a “threatening situation,” which, according to the authors of the letter, could well result in “a new Chernobyl.”

The lack of accountability, which led to the 1986 disaster, does not stop at neglecting the technical condition of the reactors that are not being properly monitored and maintained by their developers. During Viktor President Yushchenko’s administration, the decision was made to replace some of the standard fuel rods in Ukrainian reactors with unlicensed fuel assemblies supplied by Westinghouse Electric Company. In 2012, that experiment led to an emergency shutdown of Reactor 3 of the South Ukraine NPP, after Westinghouse fuel assemblies were damaged due to the specific design features of the American counterfeits.

That fuel assemblies fabricated by Westinghouse tend to malfunction in Soviet-designed reactors was not a revelation. They have repeatedly caused emergencies at NPPs in Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but that did not deter the Ukrainian leadership. Not even losses of around $175 million caused by using non-standard assemblies persuaded Ukraine against conducting risky experiments with its nuclear assets.

The new ‘revolutionary’ government, which came to power in 2014, was quick to plunge into its own experiments with nuclear power together with Westinghouse, which was suffering from financial distress. For the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017, the Ukrainian market could have been a much-needed lifeline – however, it wasn’t to be, because it once again emerged that the counterfeit fuel assemblies were dangerous for VVER-type reactors. Emergencies at Ukrainian NPPs became a routine event, and yet Westinghouse assemblies accounted for 46% of all nuclear fuel used in Ukraine by the end of 2018.

These risky experiments went beyond using non-standard fuel assemblies. In the fall of 2014, Kiev sent direct orders to boost electricity production at the South Ukraine NPP by 5 to 7%. To achieve this, three VVER-1000 reactors were supposed to operate in “controlled runaway mode,” and a whole algorithm was developed by Ukrainian and British engineers. It was this type of experiment that resulted in the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. A potential disaster was only averted by an ‘Italian strike’ organized by the NPP personnel, who refused to fulfil outsiders’ orders. This might have been what former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen meant when he said: “We have, upon Ukrainian request, sent a small team of civilian experts to Ukraine to assist the Ukrainians in improving security of their civilian nuclear plants.”

‘Revolutionary expedience’ was used a pretext for a mass exodus of experienced nuclear engineers from Ukrainian NPPs. As Ukrainian MP Viktoria Voytsitska said in 2018, literally all categories of workers were thinking of leaving Ukrainian NPPs, from steam engine drivers and riggers to engineers who controlled reactors and other high-tech equipment.

Provocation for Nuclear Escalation

After Russian forces assumed control of the Zaporozhye NPP, it became a target for incessant Ukrainian shelling, sometimes with the use of Western-made multiple launch rocket systems, heavy artillery, and attack drones. The plant sustained significant damage and was forced to stop generating electricity due to the destruction of auxiliary equipment and the threat to the reactors themselves. At the same time, an IAEA mission “was unable” to establish who was firing on the nuclear site, where Russian soldiers were present.

As the Western media was busy whipping up hysteria over the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine, it transpired that Ukraine was allegedly plotting a provocation of exactly that nature. According to Russian intelligence services, in October 2022, the Eastern Mining and Enrichment Combine in the town of Zheltye Vody and the Kiev Institute for Nuclear Research were in the final stages of developing a dirty bomb on the orders of the Ukrainian government.
A missile plant in Dnepropetrovsk built a mock-up of the Russian Iskander missile, which was supposed to carry a radioactive charge and be “shot down” over the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The goal was to accuse Russia of using nuclear weapons and push NATO to retaliate in kind. In other words, to start a nuclear war in Europe.

All these facts mean that present-day Ukraine is arguably a real threat to nuclear security not just in Europe, but on a global scale. It has everything it would take, from irresponsible people in charge of safety and security at nuclear sites, to the t

In a pair of blockbuster TwitterFiles threads, this week, journalist Matt Taibbi has blown open, even wider, the media giant's concerning collusion with the US national security state. The former Rolling Stone writer exposed how political pressure from the US Democratic Party very effectively forced the company to endorse the lie that its platform was extensively weaponised by Russia, with hugely significant consequences.

Find the "Russian trace" at any cost

The first, boldly titled 'How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In', documents how in August 2017, despite dubious allegations that Russian bots and trolls were responsible for the election of Donald Trump in the mainstream media reaching fever pitch, Twitter's hierarchy knew its platform wasn’t riddled with malign Kremlin-directed actors.

In internal emails, the company’s senior executives and communications professionals almost mocked the idea that it was overrun with Russian bots. They could neither detect “a big correlation” in account activity related to the November 2016 election, nor any “larger patterns” at all. They forecast potentially taking action against less than 25 users. As such, it was decided to simply ignore approaches from the media on the issue.

The next month, Twitter informed the Senate it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts. Senator Mark Warner, a ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, immediately held a high-profile press conference to denounce the social network’s response as “frankly inadequate on every level.”

Such pressure, combined with bitter, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declaring, “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare,” forced the social network to set up a dedicated “Russia task force” to investigate the issue. It did – and found nothing. “No evidence of a coordinated approach” between accounts flagged as potentially Kremlin-run was identified, despite an “exhaustive” internal investigation.

In all, after manually scouring through the posts of thousands of accounts flagged as “suspicious” by external actors, they found that just 32 were questionable, 17 of which were connected with Russia, and only two had spent any money on advertising – one being RT, which was specifically given favourable marketing offers by Twitter before the election.

Again, senior Democratic party officials were enraged by these results. What followed was a flurry of unhinged, sensationalist news stories, claiming Twitter was either covering up the Kremlin’s dirty work for sinister reasons, either by lying about the issue, or actively deleting reams of incriminating data to cover its own tracks.

“Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB … they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” professor Thomas Rid, an adviser to the Intelligence Committee, remarked to Politico at the time.

Surrender to politics

None of this was true. But it provided the Democrats with ammunition to threaten regulations on Twitter’s political advertising, which could’ve been extremely costly to the company’s revenue. This sent senior staffers into a panic, which was only intensified by the timely leak of a database of thousands of alleged Russian bots and trolls to major media outlets by the Intelligence Committee. This resulted in a flood of aggressive queries from journalists.

Realising the pressure would only keep mounting – as media outlets and politicians had decided this absolutely was a major scandal, irrespective of the available evidence, and were going to keep pushing until they got what they wanted – Twitter kowtowed, and publicly declared bots and trolls were in fact a massive issue on its platform, and it would be proactive in rooting out such activity in future.

Internally, Twitter executives settled on an informal, secret policy for dealing with rogue actors on the network. Publicly, they would stick to the line content was removed and users were banned “at our sole discretion,” while privately they would “off-board” anything and everything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations,” without argument.

Twitter had actively invited US spies to run its moderation process, without anyone knowing, and on the explicit internal understanding they would not be leaving. That sinister penetration widened substantially when Covid-19 arrived in the US, and again the bogeyman of Kremlin “disinformation” was the battering ram.

In February 2020, US State Department intelligence wing the Global Engagement Center published a report, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.” It claimed that a vast network of bots and trolls controlled by Moscow and amplified by China and Iran was pumping endless propaganda “describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon.”

The report’s criteria for determining if an account was a bot or troll was, unbelievably, whether the user followed “two or more” Chinese diplomats. The 250,000-strong network included Western government officials, and media outlets, including CNN. Such a weak evidentiary foundation did not deter mainstream journalists publishing countless stories endorsing the report’s findings.

Twitter staff, likely due to past experience at this point, could see what the Center was up to – namely, attempting to “insert themselves” into the “content moderation club” through which Google, Twitter and Facebook were controlled by the FBI, DHS, and other US government agencies. Executives at these tech giants were unanimously opposed to the Center’s inclusion, not least due to its “mandate for offensive” information operations to “promote American interests.”

#Hell under the heel After years of bending over backwards to placate the Democratic establishment, Twitter attempted to push back. Over a series of internal emails, various executives spelled out deep concerns about allowing the Center any influence over the platform, and initially rejected an FBI request for the organisation to be included in the moderation club’s regular 'industry call'. It was felt the Centre's involvement would pose “major risks … especially as the election heats up.”

Eventually, the FBI offered a compromise – the CIA, NSA, and Global Engagement Center would be able to simply listen to the industry calls, but wouldn’t be active participants. Twitter relented, a decision its higher-ups seem to have quickly come to regret. Before long, the social network was being bombarded with requests to censor content and ban users from every US government body under the sun.

This extended to US government officials asking for users to be banned because they didn’t personally like an individual in question. Notorious House Intelligence Committee chief Adam Schiff, a Democrat, once asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry, due to his critical reporting on the Committee’s work. After initially refusing, Sperry was later suspended.

Almost every other request was granted immediately, even those from the Global Engagement Center. This included demands to ban independent media outlets falsely claimed to be “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government.” In one email, a former CIA staffer remarked that Twitter would soon be unable to deny a single request. “Our window on that is closing,” they said.

In the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, Twitter was flooded with demands from so many officials, departments and agencies, they were confused and overworked. If action wasn’t taken promptly, followup emails quickly appeared, asking if action had yet been taken, and if not, why, and when it would be.

In one request, an FBI official even apologised “in advance for your workload.” Once, a no doubt exhausted senior attorney at the social network complained internally, “my inbox is really f'ed up at this point.”

Previous TwitterFiles threads exposed how the FBI paid the social network $3 million to process its requests. Based on the most recent disclosures, it’s clear the company and its staff were significantly underpaid for their efforts. Future releases promise yet further bombshell revelations, but the long-hidden truths divulged so far should prompt every Twitter user to reflect how the site for many years in secret operated as an effective wing of the US intelligence – and may well still do so.

Credits : Felix Livshitz

"... a symbol of everything to be feared by Jews and other minorities, chiefly ethnic Russians, in Ukraine: Stepan Bandera."

"... Bandera and his men were responsible for killing Jews, their ideology wasn’t fundamentally anti-Semitic; rather, it was pro-Ukrainian, and anti-everyone ..."

"... Bandera’s defenders justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany as no more than a tactical alliance against the USSR, the reality is that he found ideological common ground with Nazism. Bandera wanted to establish an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation state purged of Jews, Poles, Russians and other minorities ..."

Articles detailing Ukraine's turbulent history and fanaticism with Stepan Bandera

Ukraine and the Bandera cult - (2022)

Bandera supporters march in major Ukrainian cities after government names Nazi collaborators “national heroes” - (2020)

Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis. Stepan Bandera and the Legacy of World War II (2014) and here (2016)

Bandera: Ukraine’s national hero or traitor? - (2010)

Understanding Ukrainian nationalism through the prism of Bandera - (2014)

Who Was Stepan Bandera: A nationalist hero in Ukraine, Stepan Bandera was a Nazi sympathiser who left behind a horrific legacy - (2015)

Bandera, Ukraine, and the downside of nationalism: The Frankensteinian Nation and here - (2016)

Hundreds march in Ukraine in annual tribute to Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera - (2021)

The Canadian Bandera Network: Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera - (2020)

15,000 Ukraine nationalists march for divisive Bandera: Honouring Stepan Bandera - (2014)

Bandera-Youth: What kind of “tribe” is being raised in Ukraine - (2022)

Stepan Bandera: Who was he? - (2014)

Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine: A short history - (2022)

Throwing good money after bad is never a sound political strategy, especially at a time when the US public is feeling the strain of an economy in crisis.

The one thing every observer of US domestic politics must concede is that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi know how to work Congress. For four decades, Biden walked the halls of the US Senate, strong-arming colleagues to line up votes for legislation, with Pelosi team-tagging in the House of Representatives. In the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi did the same thing. Now, as president and House speaker, respectively, Biden and Pelosi pulled out all the stops to get one last piece of legislation across the finish line—the passage of an additional $45 billion in assistance for Ukraine.

To avoid the potential hurdles that would have to be negotiated trying to get a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass legislation authorising more aid to Ukraine in the coming year, Biden and Pelosi conspired to push through a massive package in the final days of the lame duck session of Pelosi’s tenure as speaker.

But there was the chance that such an effort would be seen by many in Congress for what it was— a naked political maneuver designed to obviate the will of the US people who had voted to impanel a new Congress less disposed to freely dispensing treasure in support of a cause — Ukraine — which by all accounts appears to be on the ropes. Throwing good money after bad is never a sound political strategy, especially at a time when the American public is feeling the strain of an economy in crisis.

Enter, stage right, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine and the US' most powerful propagandist when it comes to getting the US Congress to open its purse.

Previously, Ukraine’s beleaguered president was dispatched to the frontlines, where he handed out medals and received a flag signed by the “heroes of Bakhmut.” Zelensky then boarded a US Air Force plane, which whisked him off to Washington, DC where, on cue, he met with President Biden in the White House (and gave him a medal from one of the “heroes”), and addressed a joint session of Congress, handing Pelosi the autographed flag.

Nancy Pelosi alluded to the precedent of Winston Churchill as Zelensky spoke to Congress. But let there be no doubt—“Ukraine is alive and kicking” will not be carved alongside any pantheon inscribed with the words of the former British Prime Minister. Indeed, in a year’s time, no one will remember anything about Zelensky’s speech; its content was as vacuous as the cause it purported to support. Zelensky’s Washington visit was little more than empty gestures and empty words offered up as window dressing for the grift that is the more than $100 billion in aid earmarked over the course of the past year for Ukraine.

Lest anyone lose sight of what was actually transpiring in Washington DC during Zelensky’s visit. Ponder the following: it had nothing to do with providing Ukraine with the weapons it claims to need to successfully wage war against Russia. Nothing on Zelensky’s so-called “Christmas list” was funded by Congress—no M-1 Abrams tanks, no F-16 fighters, no long-range artillery rockets, no additional Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries.

The US government was playing to a domestic audience, which means that the perception of military assistance is more important than giving Ukraine what it believes it needs. The standard US excuses—the advanced tanks and aircraft are too difficult to maintain, that the Ukrainian soldier is better off with old Soviet-era weaponry than the modern western equivalent—is mooted by the fact that the current formula guiding military assistance has failed.
Russia has stabilised the situation on the battlefield and is preparing to seize the initiative, a reality that obviates the tens of billions of dollars of military assistance that has been dispatched to Ukraine. The current package, except for a single Patriot missile battery, is simply more of the same, virtually guaranteeing that Ukraine will continue to lose this conflict going forward.

This, of course, appears to be an outcome the US is willing to accept. US policy appears to be geared toward the concept of, to paraphrase US Senator Lyndsey Graham, letting Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian, so long as Russia pays a heavy price in the process. This is known to Ukraine, and yet Zelensky still came to Washington, DC.

That a Ukrainian leader would debase himself to the point of so eagerly serving as a political puppet on the US domestic political scene speaks volumes about the reality of how far Ukraine has fallen in the past year. The tragedy is that, far from helping Ukraine prevail in its war with Russia, the US aid will only guarantee the further destruction of the Ukrainian nation and its people.

Credits : Mr. Scott Ritter

The West is clinging to the impossible dream of hegemony, Russian philosopher tells RT

The conflict in Ukraine is the world’s “first multipolar war,” in which Russia is fighting for the right of every civilisation to choose its own path while the West wishes to maintain its totalitarian hegemonic globalism, Aleksandr Dugin told RT in an exclusive interview on Friday.

Multipolarity is “not against the West as such,” Dugin said, but “against the claim of the West to be the model, to be the unique example,” of history and human understanding. The current Russophobia and [manufactured] hatred of Russia, he argued, are a relic of Cold War thinking and the “bipolar understanding of the architecture of international relations.”

When the Soviet Union self-destructed in December 1991, it left the “global Western liberal civilisation,” in control of the world, Dugin noted. This hegemon is now refusing to accept the future in which it would be “not one of the two, but one of [the] few poles,” put in its proper place as “just a part, not the whole, of humanity.”

Dugin described the West as “pure totalitarian liberalism,” which pretends to have the absolute truth and seeks to impose it on everyone. “There is inherent racism in Western liberalism,” the philosopher told RT’s Donald Courter, because it “identifies the Western historical, political, cultural, experience [as] universal.”

“Nothing universal exists in multipolarity,” Dugin insisted, explaining that each civilisation can and should develop its own values. Russia specifically needs to overcome centuries of Western ideological dominance, he said, and create something “new, fresh, creative,” that would nonetheless stand “in direct refutation of the Western liberal hegemony, against open society, against individualism, against liberal democracy.”

He rejected the “dogmatic,” approaches of Marxism, fascism or liberalism to politics and economics, saying that Russia ought to strive for a “holistic,” approach in which the spiritual would be more important than the material. Obsession with material goods ends up enslaving people, Dugin told RT.

Dugin lamented the December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a “suicide,” perpetrated by the power-hungry bureaucrats in Moscow. He echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s description of it as a “geopolitical disaster,” and described it as a major victory for “Sea Power.” While the USSR was the polar opposite of the Russian Empire in terms of ideology, he explained, in geopolitical terms the two were one and the same, the strongest power in what English geographer Harold Mackinder described as the global Heartland.

While some Western observers have dubbed Dugin “Putin’s brain,” the 60-year-old philosopher and author has no official relationship with the Kremlin. He is an outspoken supporter of the current military operation in Ukraine – whose independence he considers a Western imperial project aimed against Russian sovereignty.

Dugin’s daughter Darya, 29, was assassinated in August by a car bomb planted by Ukrainian agents. Though Kiev has officially denied it, US intelligence officials later said they believe someone in the Ukrainian government was responsible.

Credits : Aleksandr Dugin

The history of the BND, its founder Reinhard Gehlen, and its loyal service to Washington

“The United States still essentially occupies Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries. At the same time, it cynically calls them equal allies... What kind of cooperation is that?”. This question was posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during his speech in the Kremlin on September 30, 2022, when agreements on the entry of the new regions into the Russian Federation were signed.

The Russian president did not go into further detail, but it's hard to argue against his words. Western Europe’s strongest country, Germany, increasingly acts against its national interests. Berlin coordinates its foreign policy course with Washington not only at regular NATO and G7 summits, but also through more private channels. One of these is Germany’s foreign intelligence service, officially called the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

This department was created in the post-WWII years by former Nazis and SS officers as a private intelligence organisation. Control over the service was entirely in the hands of the United States, and major intelligence operations were carried out in the US interest. Numerous journalistic investigations allow us to conclude that the situation has not changed much to this day.

 
Here we recall the history of German intelligence as one of the most loyal tools in the hands of the United States.

 
Officer, spy, Nazi
The history of “German intelligence” is inextricably linked with its founder Reinhard Gehlen. He was born on April 3, 1902, in Erfurt, Prussia, part of the German Empire, in the family of retired Oberleutnant Walter Gehlen. The family came from the Flemish aristocracy, where men traditionally served in the army.

Young Gehlen had every chance to break with family tradition – after the First World War, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was restricted from having military educational institutions.

Everything changed when Adolf Hitler came to power. Under his rule, Germany renewed its course toward militarisation. One of the first steps was the restoration of military educational institutions, including the General Staff College. The future head of the BND was one of its first graduates.

In 1936, Gehlen was appointed an officer of the operational department of the German army’s “South” group, under the leadership of one of the top WWII generals, Erich von Manstein. This served as a springboard for his further military career. During the Second World War, Reinhard rose to the rank of Lieutenant General and became chief of military intelligence of the Supreme Command of the German Army’s Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost (FHO). In the war years, this structure collected large amounts of data on the technical, military, strategic and political intelligence of the Soviet Union.

In fact, Gehlen owed his brilliant military career entirely to Hitler's Nazis.

In 1944, however, he was already aware of the regime’s dwindling prospects. As an ardent anti-communist, he decided to join one of the Western allies willing to pay good money for his services. The head of intelligence gave orders for numerous intelligence documents to be copied and hidden in waterproof barrels. These were then buried in various locations in the Austrian Alps.

It didn’t take long to find a buyer. In July 1943, the military department of the US Department of Defence formed the Department of Special Projects. This organization began developing a secret program for retraining German prisoners of war.

On April 5, 1945, a month before the surrender of Germany, the Lieutenant General along with his helpers, Gerhard Wessel and Hermann Bown, surrendered to the Americans, taking along Soviet-related intelligence collected during the war, and the best pro-American personnel.

Shortly before that, the Chief of Staff of the US Army, George Catlett Marshall Jr., agreed to study the archives of the Wehrmacht military formations on the Eastern front. Also in April 1945, an agreement was concluded between the intelligence services of Great Britain and the United States to study the experience of conducting military operations against the USSR. Gehlen, with his data and experience, had great timing.

Upon arrival in the United States, he was given the pseudonym Hans Holbein and issued a service certificate to conceal the fact that the US army was cooperating with SS members.

As a result of Gehlen's agreement with the American government, starting in mid-September 1945, prisoners of war in a camp with the postal address P.O Box 1142, Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA began research work under his guidance. The project was code-named "B" (Bolero).

 
The Nazi theme club
According to information obtained from CIA archives, about 200 officers took part in the scheme from October 1945 to April 1946. The result of their work was a document numbering 3,657 pages, prepared for the governments of the United Kingdom, the US, and Canada.

In July 1946, Gehlen's Bolero group was merged with another intelligence unit composed of former Nazis. This was Keystone, a service monitoring radio transmission on USSR-controlled European territory. It was headed by Herman Baun and located in Oberursel, Germany. The joint operation of these two groups was code-named Rusty, and their main task was to collect intelligence about the state of the USSR's armed forces on European territories under its control.

A few months later, Gehlen and the US government agreed to create a full-fledged spy agency called The Gehlen Organization. He himself headed the organization, remaining its permanent leader until its abolition.

Some of the first people Gehlen recruited were SS and Gestapo officers who were issued false names and forged documents.

The CIA’s declassified archives have a dossier on one of the staff members, Heina Paul Johannes, who served in SS units and joined the organization under the name Karl Schuetz.

Among the first to join were SS-Obersturmfuhrers Frans Goring and Hans Sommer, and SS-Sturmfuhrer Herbert Stein.

Gehlen also took in Lieutenant General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, former commander of the 4th Panzer Army; Major General Nichtke, who commanded divisions in Poland and Russia; Major General Rudolf Kleinkamp, who headed the personnel service of the Wehrmacht High Command; Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Gudernan; Colonel von Kretschmer, former military attaché in Tokyo; and other Wehrmacht soldiers.

The leading positions at the head of the groups were occupied by former SS officers whom Gehlen knew personally. Colonel Heinz Heer became the chief analyst; Colonel Ulrich Noack headed the research group on the USSR economy; Captain Blossfeldt led the interrogations.

The agents providing information to the organization consisted entirely of pro-Hitler citizens who participated in active hostilities during World War II on the side of Nazi Germany.

 
New activities of the former Nazis
Official registration data for The Gehlen Organization is missing for obvious reasons. We only know that it operated under different names: from 1949 to 1950 under the code name “Offspring”, from 1950 to 1951 as “Odeum”, and from 1951 to 1956 as “Zipper”.

The main activity of the organisation was to obtain intelligence in the countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR.

On April 1, 1946, the new organisation's trial operations began and subsequently received a positive assessment from US representatives.

However, The Gehlen Organization's first major operation was launched in 1947 and code-named “Aktion Hermes.” Its goal was to systematically interrogate hundreds of thousands of former German prisoners of war, who were beginning to return from Soviet camps where they were forced to participate in rebuilding the country.

The organisation's agents held permanent positions in the repatriation camps of Western zones, and then in Germany. Almost every repatriate – both soldier and civilian – was contacted by agents who asked him about where they were held and the factories where they worked. The agents were primarily interested in spies from the other side.

The main topics were the Soviet industry, armaments, telecommunications, and the population’s attitude toward the government.

When Gehlen's agents discovered a marked increase in the production of tanks and military aircraft in the Soviet Union after 1945, the news troubled the US military, which received all the reports.

In May 1949, British intelligence also led “Operation Jungle”, the purpose of which was to prepare and dispatch sabotage detachments operating under the guise of national liberation movements into the Baltic republics and socialist Poland.

In the late 1940s, MI6 set up a special centre in Chelsea, London, to train agents to be sent to the Baltic States. The operation was led by Henry Carr, director of the North European Department of MI6, and the head of the Baltic Branch, Alexander McKibbin.

The Gehlen Organization was tasked with selecting agents for the operation from among former Nazis.

Agents were transported to the Baltic States by sea under the cover of fictitious maritime transport company British Baltic Fishery Protection Service, which operated on a wartime high-speed military boat.

Officially, the company was engaged in protecting West German fishermen from “Soviet arbitrariness” at sea. The boats were modified (with weights reduced to increase speed).

To hide the British government’s involvement in case the boat was seized by the Soviet Navy, and the Gehlen Organization provided it with a German crew.

However, the USSR's Ministry of State Security (MGB) was notified of the operation through its agents in Britain, and almost all of the 42 “Jungle” agents were arrested.

 
A celebration at whose expense?
In his memoirs, Gehlen wrote: “Until 1956, we did not have the opportunity to cover employees with state insurance, since formally, the employer did not exist.”

At the initial stage of The Gehlen Organization, Washington used it as a cell of its own army. It was the US army that took on the task of equipping the group of Nazi intelligence officers with technical tools ranging from typewriters to the necessary radio equipment.

The newly created institution was funded exclusively from the US budget, and the number of funds allocated, according to reports from various sources, ranged from $1.5 million to $3.4 million per year for 50 employees.

Additionally, the US Army supplied the organisation with cash as well as consumer goods from its warehouses, which were exchanged on the black market for money, as barter goods, or used as payment.

In September 1946, the company received 160,000 cigarettes, 43,300 litres of gasoline, and approximately $50,000 from the US Army.

In the period from July to October 1948, 82,153 chocolate bars, 67,150 packs of cigarettes, 4,500 razor blades, and 1,815 pairs of wool socks intended for The Gehlen Organization were produced.

American journalist Mary Ellen Rees, in her book “General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection”, wrote:
"Gehlen’s quickly expanding organization was constantly in need of money. What the US army provided was not enough, and the “black market” became its main source of income. The system was equally effective and shameless. The army provided the organization with money for supplies, which the organization's special teams sold on the “black market”. Following the deals, the Criminal Affairs Division of the US Army confiscated the goods on the grounds that they had illegally entered the "black market", and again took them into its property, which then again ended up on the "black market". After the currency reform in June 1948, when the new German mark was introduced, this profitable cycle became a question of survival. According to Gehlen, its purchasing power then decreased by 70 percent.”

In 1949, The Gehlen Organization became subordinate to the CIA and remained under its control until Germany established its own government, for which the organisation proceeded to work.

Among the documents found in CIA archives was the organisation's payroll. At the time, the salary of each employee ranged from 500 to 900 US dollars.

From the early 1950s, the German economy financed the institution through an agency code-named the “Industrial Research Institute”.

In 1951, the organisation received 600,000 Deutsche marks from partner companies Standart Elektrik AG, Rodenstock and Messerschmitt.

From 1954, monthly funding was provided by Bonn in the amount of 30,000 Deutsche marks. The money also came from the Federal Chancellor's Reptilienfonds.

 
The birth of the German intelligence service
In June 1950, Gehlen expressed his views in favour of creating a West German foreign intelligence service to Hans Globke, the Secretary of State in the office of the Federal Chancellor, and in September of the same year, he spoke to the Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself.

His views eventually found support due to the changing situation in international politics.

In June 1950, the Korean War began, which made it clear that the “Cold War” could turn into real combat at any moment.

In divided Germany, two opposing social systems – communism and capitalism – stood literally opposite each other. The new war in Asia emphasised the vital need to collect information about the enemy and determined the course of intelligence priorities.

The conjuncture was on the side of military espionage – primarily against troops in Eastern Germany ("short-range intelligence"), as well as in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern Bloc countries, including Yugoslavia and Albania ("deep intelligence") and in the Soviet Union itself ("long-range intelligence").

Intensive efforts to include The Gehlen Organization in the structure of the Federal Government and thus ensure its budgetary financing were crowned with success five years later, when on July 11, 1955, the Cabinet of Ministers finally decided to take control of the organisation and subordinate it to the Office of the Federal Chancellor.

Less than a year later, on April 1, 1956, The Gehlen Organization was finally transformed into the BND, but its structure had not changed in any way. Gehlen himself remained the permanent head of intelligence for a