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Lies, Spies and US Bioweapons on the Verge of Armageddon

By Wayne Cristaudo | The Postil Magazine | November 1, 2022

Initially, when the Russians brought the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs to the attention of the world, it was denied outright—the official Western response was—”those Ruskies just never stop lying.” And having shut down RT news, hardly anyone in the West knew anything about the Russian claim except that it was being made and it was therefore “disinformation,” and only conspiracy theorists believed it. Given there still has been no declaration of war by any Western country against Russia, one might think the “voices of social conscience” and the “guardians of truth” might at least be curious to know why the Western population was generally being “protected” from Russian news sources because the bright sparks thought the people just too dumb to be able to distinguish between truth and lie.

For a few years now, the bright sparks have decided that they alone know “the truth.” I am not sure which “settled science” it was exactly that decided that Russian media always tells lies, and that Western people are too gullible to be trusted with open access to Russian media. But it must have been the result of some scientific study by irreproachable “scientists,” because the masters of social conscience know and own the science on any given topic, and it was only us stooges that thought that such control of information was further proof of the dangerous totalitarian stranglehold of the Western world’s “leaders” and their mental enforcers.

But glory be, thanks to Victoria Nuland, that brain box and Democrat wife of Republican neo-con Robert Kagan, the current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of State European and Eurasian Affairs, the US go-to girl in the “Revolution of Dignity” (you know, the one where “Dignity” meant burning alive their political opponents in Odessa—which local Russian speakers put at close to 400. But, hey, what would they know—they only lived there)—the story needed to by updated. Nuland clarified to the hapless Marco Rubio, who, when questioning her, expected her to respond that there were no labs, that they were actually just perfectly safe biolabs, conducting public health research. But with Russians in the picture, Nuland took on the role of Cassandra to warn that said labs in Ukraine were now a cause for concern, because their benign public health research was sure to be turned into “bioweapons” by those evil Russians.

Of course, the issue of biolabs and bioweapons is central to what is happening now—and is yet another factor in Russia’s “invasion.” And to make sure we would all share “the correct” memory of all this, on June 9, 2022 AD, the Pentagon released a Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries. I think the centerpiece of the document is this:

The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.

On its release, some journalists, like Steve Sweeney from People’s World reported (June 14) that “The Pentagon said on Thursday that it has operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine handling dangerous pathogens, after previously dismissing the charges as Russian propaganda.” PolitiFact quickly weighed in with “The 46 facilities referenced in the articles and in the government’s fact sheet are owned and operated by Ukraine.” In the world of PolitiFact “working collaboratively” does not seem to be a synonym for funding. But while for the strict grammarians and guardians of “facts,” a tomato is definitely not a tomahto, the pertinent issue is smothered in the race to present nice, neat, clean facts to prevent us from ever believing anything that was not put together by team Goody Global Two Shoes—and that is the point made by bioweapons analyst Francis Boyle:

One of the latest explanations from a U.S. State Department spokesperson is that Ukraine has ‘biodefense’ laboratories, which are ‘not biological weapons facilities.’ The problem with making a distinction between ‘biodefense’ and ‘biowarfare’ is that, basically, there is none. No biodefense research is purely defensive, because to do biodefense work, you’re automatically engaged in the creation of biological weapons. All dual use research can be used for military purposes, and often is. As explained by Boyle, the idea behind ‘biodefense’ research is that there might be a natural pathogen out there that can cause a pandemic, or someone might release an engineered biological weapon, that we need to prepare a cure for.

How did such an obvious point pass the mental geniuses who tell us what to think? By the way Boyle is a human rights lawyer for all sorts of causes that generally fit neatly into the educated politically activist academic consensus (a critic of Israel and exponent of Palestinian rights, an advocate for indigenous and first nation rights, a supporter of Hawaiian self-determination, an international-law expert and legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president). Then, he took an interest in bioweaponry and connected it to COVID. At once he became a “conspiracy theorist.” Anyone who thinks Big Pharma is capable of hazardous decisions, leveraging government and being involved in cartel collusion, and profiteering, and that it should be subjected to the kinds of protocols that no longer seem to exist for any of the larger corporations — is now labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

If such a prime fact as Boyle’s about the nature of “biodefense” is smothered by weasel words, and by simply deferring to official statements made by the very operatives whose operations are being questioned, how was it ever possible for questions about government bioweaponry to get a serious airing in the public sphere? Answer—it was not possible, because the rules governing the “public square” no longer favor any kind of critical discussion—the public square itself dictates “the acceptable answers” to topics, and the public square is what the owners of that square say that it is — for the public square is very much a private possession.

But apart from the logic that Boyle brought to the conversation, even before every major news outlet in the country was falling over itself to attack right-wing conspiracy theorists, Newspunch counterpunched by demonstrating what a bunch of fraudsters the factcheckers are—when it reached back into the archives and found a piece from BioPrepWatch.com published in 2010: “Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Ordered Ukraine BioLabs to Develop ‘Deadly Pathogens.’” Allow me to reproduce the rest of the report:

Thenationalpulse.com reports: The article, which also highlighted the work of former Senator Dick Lugar, was additionally included in Issue No. 818 of the United States Air Force (USAF) Counterproliferation Center’s Outreach Journal.

Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu,” explained author Tina Redlup.

A 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Anticipating Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories explained how the Odessa-based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.

This laboratory was reconstructed and technically updated up to the BSL-3 level through a cooperative agreement between the United States Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine that started in 2005. The collaboration focuses on preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens, and knowledge that can be used in the development of biological weapons,” the report continues.

The updated laboratory serves as Interim Central Reference Laboratory with a depozitarium (pathogen collection). According to Ukrainian regulations, it has a permit to work with both bacteria and viruses of the first and second pathogenic groups,” explains the report.

A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.

Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”

Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”

The unearthed biolab facility follows intense scrutiny over the U.S. government’s decision to fund risky, “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan at a Chinese Communist Party-run lab with military ties.

The combination of algorithmic-controlled information and the vanishing of web sites that disprove the approved “line” of the cabal at Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., as well as the CIA, the FBI and the Government—is now such a conspicuous feature of our information flow in the West that an obvious question arises—how can anyone, who wants to get at the truth of things, still believe any official news source today? With respect to the war, in general, and the biolabs, in particular, the only position that is now permitted to be published in mainstream media is that if the Russians claim something, it is ipso facto propaganda and false. All nice and Manichean. And the way this seems to now be proven is that Government intelligence officials tell us so. Once upon a time academics and journalists were far more inclined to think that if the CIA said something there was a fair to good chance it was a lie.

So, before we carry on with looking briefly at the history of US biowarfare and what the Russian arguments and claims about US biolabs and weapons are, and why this should be widely known and discussed, instead of being denounced, and shutdown — let us just remind ourselves of a few unpleasant truths about the CIA, and why it is utterly imbecilic (and fully in keeping with the our age of the imbecilic) that journalists have derived their facts and larger narrative for understanding the Russia-Ukraine war from the Central Imbecilic (sorry, I meant, Intelligence) Agency.

Trust US. We are the CIA

Those of a certain age will most like be familiar with Phillip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which is Agee’s first-hand account of his twelve years as a CIA agent during his time in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Washington. The essentials are laid out in a couple of early paragraphs of the book, where he writes:

When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don’t know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA’s. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it’s concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress.

In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to “destabilize” the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Sometime later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.

Since Agee’s diary. there have been other accounts of the CIA, mainly by former operatives or academics, which go into the details of all the election rigging, coups, assassination attempts, false flag operations, torturing and various conspiracies (yes, shock, horror! the CIA has a history of conspiring to overthrow regimes, and fuel revolts and start wars). Before the Left was a woke joke, and the CIA had set up shop as a diversity service provider, scholars like William Blum (see his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) would write books exposing the various dirty tricks and machinations (installing bloody dictators, arming terrorists, working with drug runners, arms runners and money laundering—all for the good of the world. I thoroughly recommend Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World—it also has a chapter on the CIA in Ukraine. Here is synopsis of another book, Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former DEA agent, Michael Levine which gives a pretty good account of what the CIA have been up to in the more overtly criminal stakes:

… the CIA has perverted the American criminal justice system by protecting drug dealers and murderers from prosecution; that Federal judges and prosecutors alleged to have broken narcotics laws have been protected from investigation; that the government of Bolivia and South American drug cartel leaders have been assisted and even paid by the CIA… without CIA support, South American cartels and the epidemic of cocaine and crack use in the U.S. would never have occurred.

During the Maidan revolution in 2014, McCain and Nuland were doing photo ops with Svoboda (the neo-Nazi political party) leader Oleh Tyahnybok and his cronies who were busy assisting in regime change. After all, at the end of the Second World War US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II, who “successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.” This was hidden from the public for some fifty years, until documents pertaining to this history were declassified in 2002. The following from The National Security Archive in 2005 is worth quoting:

The documentation unearthed by the IWG (The Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group) reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material in May of 2004, in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service.

Apparently, the Nazi spies were a disaster! As the report continues:

Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem.

But now that Russia’s geopolitical concerns are strategically regional and have nothing in common with the globalist aspirations of the former Soviets, many of the very people who previously were very willing to denounce the CIA for its interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Indonesia etc. are more than willing to read from the script prepared by the CIA. Still, the take-home point from any of the left-leaning books on the CIA, written in the last thirty years or so, is that the CIA acted covertly, criminally, and very often under the veil of “plausible deniability;” which is to say, it was often left free to do whatever it thought necessary, without there being any followable line of command that would link its actions to the President—and, of course, it lied—constantly. It also involved itself in propaganda. It is obvious that the entrenchment of nefarious practices tend to continue well after any rationale for adopting them has vanished. On the issue of propaganda, the following from Agee is important:

The CIA’S role in the US propaganda program is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the ‘Grey Law’ of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID’S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.

Sound familiar? Allow me to align this with a piece by NBC (April 6 2022) that is breathtaking in its combination of chutzpah and imbecilic integrity. The headline reads “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.” “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something.”

It continues:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Who needs rock solid when the government and its intel are so great?

Let’s consider one last piece on the CIA—Tim Weiner’s, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It is a fairly sober account of the CIA by a journalist whose recent pronouncements—short of anything resembling proof—on this war seem to me to make him prey to his own quarry. But his book of 2007 makes some good points. The first is a good summing up of the limits of “intelligence”—which is salient to why it is insane for journalists to think they are doing a democracy anything other than a disservice by parroting the “talking points” of their “intelligence” sources: “Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: ‘There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,’ he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”

The second, is a good summary of how the intelligence game changed with the war on terror, and how that “war” has led to how the CIA now operates:

The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before–beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before–beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before–most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.” Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

Of course, the justification for the “war on terror” moved from the war against the Taliban to the war against Iraq; and while the rationale of that war, mentioned below, was based on false information, the real rationale enthusiastically repeated on numerous occasions by Tony Blair was that it was the task of democracies to overthrow tyrants wherever they were. Hence the requisite procedure in the international arena becomes one of declaring one’s enemy a tyrant to legitimate regime change. And as was signaled with the passing of the Magnitsky Act back in 2012, which enabled the seizure of Russian assets, the decision that regime change had to occur in Russia precedes not only the present war in the Ukraine, but the Maidan.

And if anyone out there still thinks the CIA is a trustworthy institution (and I have not even touched upon its various debacles which have been addressed by other authors) let’s go to the third passage from Weiner, which I think particularly pertinent because even the slew of pro-war Democrats might remember where they purportedly once stood (of course, I am joshing. Most of them went in boots and all with young George W and the CIA. So much for principles):

President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.

In a nutshell, there is nothing about the CIA’s history which indicates that it is a trustworthy operation. The good thing about most of the left-wing writings on the CIA—and even though I am often critical of the Left, I have always thought this aspect of their investigations to be a valuable contribution to any public considerations of state action—is that they invariably identity the nexus between corporate interests and the state. An iconic expression of the problem was by Major General Smedley Butler back in the 1930s in his War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Nothing has changed in that the real reason for NATO expansionism and for the most brazen proxy war funded by way Western governments funneling tax payers’ money, without resorting to anything remotely resembling electoral approval, to send weapons to Ukraine.

Far less reported are NATO’s nuclear war games which are being held some six hundred miles from Russia. And what is simply not known at all—is what the Russians are saying about US bioweapons.

A Brief History of The US Bioweapon Research and Why the Russians Are Bothered

US government research into biological warfare originated in the Second World War in response to British and French concerns that the Nazis might attack with biological weapons. They didn’t, but the Japanese were also developing biological weapons that they would use against the Chinese—they experimented on prisoners, poisoned wells, and dropped plague infested fleas over cities and rice fields. The Soviets had also been attacked with biological weapons, and after the war they convicted some of the Japanese researchers, although the Soviets had already been working on biological warfare from the 1920s and would become world leaders in bioweaponry until the Union collapsed.

The defeat of the Japanese provided a valuable source of new recruits for the US government in the area of biological warfare. The extent to which the US was able to make use of the Japanese research is not altogether clear, but we do know that both in the US and Japan secret research was being conducted, involving known war criminals for the next forty years. This information started coming to light in the 1990s when, as Sheldon Harris in his book of 1994, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, the Clinton administration “began to lift the veil of secrecy concerning United States; experiments with human subjects in hundreds of studies during and since the end of World War II.” Forgive the lengthiness of the quote from Harris; but as most people will not be aware of this, I think it important to cite in full; and it nicely provides something of a history of US, Japanese and Soviet bioweaponry:

We now know that American scientists tested humans with mustard gas, other chemical agents, exposed others to radiation tests, and still others to a variety of pathogens without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. In many instances, the most distinguished scientists from the most prestigious American universities participated both in deceiving their patients and in conducting the experiments. Even today, those scientists still active in the field, and their host universities, deny involvement. Recently opened former Soviet archives disclose that the Soviet Union inaugurated a large-scale biological warfare program beginning in the mid-1920s. Humans were used often in experiments that covered a variety of diseases potentially useful in biological warfare. Research facilities were established throughout that vast nation, and, according to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, such research continues covertly today.

The Soviet cover was partially blown in 1979 when a massive outbreak of anthrax affected a large area around the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. The most conservative estimates are that at least ninety-six people were infected, and that some sixty-six people died as a result of the outbreak. The true figures, no doubt, are higher. The most terrifying aspect of the outbreak was the disclosure that the Sverdlovsk biological warfare plant accidentally released less than one gram of anthrax spores, possibly as little as several milligrams. It does not take much imagination to calculate how much death and destruction the release of a few grams of anthrax spores into a heavily populated community could cause.

In Japan, scientists who participated in involuntary human experiments during World War II, and earlier, dominated the administration and controlled the areas of research of the country’s National Institute of Health for one half-century after the war ended… it should be noted here that at least seven of the NIH’s Directors and five of the Institute’s Vice Directors, during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged in biological warfare experiments which employed human test subjects. The National Institute of Health is a government-supported agency. Yet these known war criminals were employed by this institution, were given great powers within the organization and continued to use humans without their consent, and often without their knowledge, in investigations that were carried on during the course of more than forty years. It is known that experiments were authorized on prisoners, babies and patients in psychiatric hospitals in 1947, and from 1952 until 1955 by the NIH’s Vice Director Masami Kitaoka. Another researcher conducted bacteriological experiments on infants hospitalized in Tokyo’s National First Hospital in 1952. Later, this same researcher, from 1967 until 1971, used shigella in experiments on soldiers in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. In May 1985, an NIH researcher experimentally injected an unapproved vaccine against a Japanese encephalitis virus into nearly 200 hospitalized children without their parents’ consent. At different times over a three-year period, 1987, 1988, 1989, Kuniaki Nerome experimentally tested two types of genetically modified vaccine against influenza on approximately forty hospitalized children. Their parents were unaware of the tests and did not give their informed consent for the vaccines to be used on their children.

There are a number of international treaties being drawn up that seek to outlaw biological warfare, and, by implication, involuntary human experimentation. The United States, Russia (the former Soviet Union) and Japan are signatories to the various international agreements outlawing human experimentation, and the production of biological warfare agents. Nevertheless, both these activities appear to be flourishing today in all three countries, as well as elsewhere in various parts of the world. It appears that human testing, biological and chemical weapons will be part of former President George Bush’s so-called new world order for some time to come.

It is true that in 1969 President Nixon made a statement signaling the end of US offensive biological weapons programs and in 1972, along with Soviet Union, the Biological Weapons Conventions, outlawing biological warfare. What one makes of this very much depends upon what one thinks of the efficacy of international declarations, pieces of paper and signatures, and whether one thinks public gestures disclose hidden operations.

One investigative journalist who was doing his job well was Gordon Thomas. Early in his book, Spies and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, in the midst of discussing the anthrax attacks that took place in the US in October 2001, he writes:

In 2004, the U.S. armory of weaponized biological agents consisted of 19 bacteria, 43 viruses, 14 toxins and 4 rickettsiae. Their use remains outlawed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Within five years of the protocol’s creation Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the Soviet Union had all signed. The United States did not sign until 1975. By then the U.S. had developed a massive biochemical arsenal. Shortly before the September 11 attack, the Pentagon admitted that at Nellis Air Force base, one of the most secret in America, it had established the world’s largest stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. It had been created largely by CIA scientists. One of these scientists had been an obsessive “biochemist whose work pioneered the research which eventually led to the stockpile. His name was Frank Olson.

On that terrible September day in 2001, Olson’s son, Eric, was living in the family home in Frederick, Maryland, a short distance from Fort Detrick, where his father had worked for the CIA. That establishment then—and now—remains a restricted place, guarded by a variety of electronic defenses and armed “guards. As the television set in Eric’s living room endlessly replayed the 9/11 scenes of destruction from New York and Washington, he typed into his computer—on which he had stored so many astonishing matters relating to the death of his father—the most astounding claim of all:

“My father was murdered because the CIA feared he would reveal the biggest American secret of the Cold War, perhaps of all time. It is the secret of how the CIA was involved in biological warfare as well as mind control. My father had a key part in both programs.”

The takeaways from this very brief history are simply that the US has engaged in bioweapon research; that it has stockpiles — an “armory” — of weaponized biological agents; and that it is extremely secretive. Everything can of course have a purely benign spin—the research is purely defensive/preventative. It exists to save us from bio attacks by terrorists or rogue states — like Russia — and that it is important to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting hold of the research and having access to the biological agents. As we all know the United States is still the only state to have used nuclear weapons. It sets itself up as the moral arbiter of nations and what constitutes a just international order. It is entitled to be an exceptional state—that’s part of its Calvinist heritage (hard to believe when you see its public clowns today) — but it sticks to it. The question is: is the USA a force for the angels? Or does it say one thing and do another? Is its bioresearch all for the human good? Or is it a potential source of devastation?

Irrespective of what you or I might think, the thing that must be born in mind when the Russians went on the offensive about the biolabs in the Ukraine, and the US went from denial (and when that became too implausible) to “nothing to see here, all above-board, and there is nothing remotely dangerous in any of this.”

Apart from what seems to me to be the Western explanation—one can very easily find out why the Russians are bothered, and why it might even be reasonable for them to be bothered when one listens to what they are saying. And what they are saying is deeply disturbing, and as far as I can see it, while the very idea that Ukrainian/ US biolabs could be genuinely perceived as a serious threat to Russia is ridiculed and ‘factchecked’ by repeating government/ intelligence press releases, anyone who reads the Russian Government Report, The activities of the biological laboratories of the US Department of Defense in Ukraine will see that, at the very least, there is a story here, and that to bury it is but one more egregious example of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our “idea-broking” professionals.

An essential component of that story is the connection between the end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO (which the West refuses to concede is any serious cause of aggravation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which involves “experts” and “journalists” repeating the lie that none ever said NATO expansion would stop with the end of the Cold War), and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That Program was initiated by the US government working in cooperation with the Pentagon and CIA—the Pentagon Division was originally entitled the “Defense Special Weapons Agency,” before changing its name to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Army Institute for Medical Research on Infectious Diseases. The Program’s ostensible purpose was the elimination of stockpiles of Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which effectively gave the US control over former Soviet biological weapons.

Although, it might be a source of puzzlement for those who think that the USA, unlike any other imperial or hegemonic power, simply acts for the good of all human kind — and that it and its allies are not driven by the strategic self-interests of their ruling classes — the “Cooperative Reduction Program” not only involved taking over the stockpiles (and specialists trained in developing and studying pathogens and bioweapon technology) in Russia, but also countries “along the perimeter of the borders of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,” before expanding into other parts of Asia and Africa.

What was meant to be an elimination program morphed into something far more in keeping with a geopolitical strategy commensurate with the continuation of NATO expansion and the United States’ mission of a unipolar world, and a source of concern for the Russians, viz. “one after another transferred their collections of dangerous pathogens to the United States in exchange for American help. Who neutralized them in America, how and whether they were actually destroyed—remained a mystery.”

But then everything to do with the labs was a mystery—which, on a tangential though not completely unrelated matter, is why the issues of the laboratory source of COVID, and the pharmaceutical and financial and political networks involved in the origin of the pandemic (whether true or fake) are still smothered in deceit and mystery.

In any case, what was officially presented as a program of elimination turned into an opportunity too good to miss, as an extensive network of labs working with dangerous viruses were set up in former Soviet countries: “All of them were financed by the US Department of Defense, were called differently everywhere and were created, as a rule, on the basis of scientific research institutes and SES, created back in the Soviet period. One of the features of this program consisted in the fact that in each country not one object was erected, but a whole cluster at once. Part of it was concentrated directly in the capitals of the former republics, while related institutions were located in different parts of the country.”

The Report then identifies what it calls two “strong opinions” about this network in the former Soviet republics, and they are worth citing at length:

First. American biological programs in the post-Soviet states are a way to circumvent the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (BTWC). Despite the fact that the Convention was signed back in 1972, to this day, the control mechanism does not work largely due to the efforts of the United States, although the world expert community spent more than 45 years developing it. In 2001, the US demonstrated to the world that it had active bioprograms. After the attack on September 11, 2001, deaths of anthrax among people suddenly began to be recorded, and postal envelopes became the transmission route of this infection. The US Congress conducted an investigation (later it turned out that the recipe was combat and came out of the walls of the US Army bacteriological center at Fort Detrick). The attack against its own people, attributed to terrorists, gave huge political dividends to the US leadership. Now there was a formal reason to declare that the States are victims of biological terrorism and therefore unilaterally withdraw from the mechanism of collective control over the implementation of the BTWC. In autumn 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this in Geneva. At the same time, a biological threat reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) was proposed, and the United States began large-scale construction of military biological laboratories, including around Russia. But holding the United States accountable for conducting biological experiments that violate the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons is almost impossible. The US does not recognize the International Criminal Court and was not a signatory to the founding Rome Statute…

Second. The United States, after the collapse of the USSR, became very concerned about the conditions for the storage of pathogens and, as a result, the threat of a biological attack on America. The global American project declares its goal to minimize these threats, which is why tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in laboratories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Ukraine. They say that dangerous strains of microorganisms may leak into the environment in these countries. However, it does not explain how, for example, Armenia or Uzbekistan can organize a biological attack on the United States or why the laboratories are mainly located in large cities with a high population density or at a close distance from them. After all, it is much more logical, if there is even a minimal threat of pathogen leakage, to build such facilities in a desert area in order to eliminate the possibility of the spread of pathogens and epidemics.

As for the more specific purposes of the research, the penultimate paragraph of the Report sums it up thus:

The activities of American biological laboratories damage the economy, including by indirect methods (due to the destruction of livestock of diseased livestock, discrediting livestock products on local and world markets), as well as the human potential of Russia (reduction of general immunity and resistance to seasonal diseases, ability to reproduce, decreased efficiency, etc.), the diversion of significant forces and resources of the state to combat artificial outbreaks of infectious diseases. As a result the dependence of the attacked countries (Russia, China and Iran) on the products of the Western pharmaceutical industry is increasing, hoping in the future to offer medicines against artificially caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The Report also notes the mutuality of political, military and corporate interests that are embedded in bioresearch, and the geopolitical conditions that the US needs to establish and maintain for it to be effective. Again, I quote at length:

US biolaboratories located along the borders of the Russian Federation have a number of common features. These objects are strictly classified and are located in cities or near cities with a population of over a million (Odessa, Kharkov, Almaty), near seaports (Odessa), airports (Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv) or in earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia (Yerevan, Gyumri, Ijevan) , and even in areas with a probability of 9-magnitude earthquakes (Almaty). The construction of laboratories as part of projects to counter biological threats allows the United States to fully control the biological situation on the territory of both the respective post-Soviet countries and their transboundary neighbors. Virologists know that there is only one step from studying bacteria to creating a bacteriological weapon. In addition, the biolaboratories created by the United States, operating in a closed regime, are removed from the control of the governments of the countries in which they are located. Laboratories are often staffed by Americans with diplomatic immunity, and local health officials do not have direct access to these facilities.

The number of laboratory staff, from 50 to 250 people, far exceeds the number of personnel needed to maintain modern civilian laboratories with stated goals. The heads of the facilities are often appointed by persons from among the military loyal to Washington or intelligence officers. So, the CRL in Tbilisi was previously headed by the chief of Georgian intelligence Anna Zhvania and he was subordinate not to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Defense of Georgia.

In the case of Ukraine, and unlike other parts of the former USSR, it was not until the Presidency of George W. Bush that bioweapon research was conducted there. Like Obama and Trump after him, George W. originally campaigned on a foreign policy platform of cooperation with Russia—but that counted for zero once elected, and his regime’s setting up of military laboratories in Ukraine would be an important part in a chain of events that has led to the brink we now live upon.

The Report quotes the Political Scientist Dmitry Skvortsov: 

“Now there are 15 military laboratories in the country at once, and their activities are absolutely non-transparent and unaccountable. Hence the conclusion: these facilities were created by the Pentagon as manufacturers of biological weapons. Otherwise, why aim to prevent the spread of ‘technologies, viruses and pathogens’ used in the development of biological weapons in facilities where these weapons have never been developed?”

The Report also quotes the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov complaining about the secrecy surrounding the research and the lack of controls able to be exercised on the research.

When the story about the existence of the US/Ukraine biolabs was labelled “misinformation,” before being changed to “so what? It’s for our own good,” one might have thought that would be some follow up by journalists about claims of odd viral outbreaks in Ukraine. But that has never happened. Just because journalists do not report things does not mean such things do not exist. And the Report points out that there have been bacterial and viral outbreaks in Ukraine of the sort which indicate laboratory sources.

For example in 2010 and 2015, there were California flu pandemics:

… when the epidemiological threshold was exceeded in 20 regions. From October 2015 to February 2016, more than 350 virologically confirmed deaths from this type of A (H1N1) virus were registered in Ukraine, with 40% of deaths were young people from 18 to 26 years old who did not have chronic diseases.”

Also,

Since 1995, no cases of cholera have been registered in Ukraine. And suddenly in 2011 in Mariupol, 33 people get sick at once. In 2009, 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil suffered from a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic pneumonia. In 2014, there was another outbreak of cholera in Ukraine, which came from nowhere—then 800 people fell ill. The same thing happens in 2015 and 2017: about a hundred cases were registered in Mykolaiv.

In 2015, fatal cases of leptospirosis, rabies and other pathologies, which have long been forgotten in the EU countries, were recorded in Ukraine. In 2016, an epidemic begins in the country botulism, from which four people die, and in 2017—eight more, only according to official data.

In January of the same year, 37 residents of Nikolaev were hospitalized with “jaundice”, six months later 60 people with the same diagnosis were hospitalized in Zaporozhye. At the same time, an outbreak of hepatitis A was noted in Odessa, and 19 children from the boarding school were sent to the hospital in the Odessa region. In November 27 cases of infection have already been recorded in Kharkiv. The virus was transmitted through drinking water.

The Report also notes:

… the existence of 13,476 permanently dysfunctional anthrax sites in the country, which no one deals with, and some of them graze cattle. Only in the Odessa region there are 430 potentially dangerous objects where animals can catch the disease.

This is exactly what happened in 2018, when anthrax broke out in several villages of the Odessa region: five people ended up in the hospital with a skin form of the disease. In the Sumy region there are at least 20 animal burial grounds with anthrax, and not designated in any way.

The situation with the incidence of botulism is also close to catastrophic. In 2016, 115 cases of botulism were reported in Ukraine, of which 12 were fatal. In 2017, the country’s Ministry of health service has confirmed an additional 90 cases and 8 deaths. In subsequent years, the trend continued: 13 outbreaks were registered in the first three months of 2020 botulism, 15 people got sick, including one child of 9 years old.

The Report also draws attention to another tactic of biological weaponry that might be easier to ignore because its effects are far less dramatic and overt—and that is the release of many “small viruses, colds, varieties of runny nose, multiple strains of influenza,” that do not kill or seriously injure those affected, but which impact the general well-being and energy of a population.

And then there are the epidemics affecting agriculture and the economy:

With the beginning of the active work of DTRA in Ukraine, mass deaths from epidemics began not only of people, but also of animals. Avian flu and African swine fever have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s agriculture. For example, in 2015, 60 thousand pigs were killed and burned at the Kalita agricultural plant alone. At the end of 2016, the EU banned the import of poultry meat from Ukraine due to the epidemiological situation in the country. According to published data, since 2017 Ukraine already imports more sausage than it exports. Thus, Ukraine from a competitor in the market of agricultural products is turning into a market for these products from the EU and the USA. The money invested in the laboratory is returned.

Another example were the outbreaks of bird flu was in 2016 and 2017 that led to a temporary bans by the EU and some Eastern European countries on Ukrainian poultry.

Finally, let me cite one last section of the Report which discusses another report undertaken by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “analyzing the risks associates with activities in the field of American biological laboratories. In particular, the document notes that the program provides for the accumulation in the Kherson Regional Laboratory Center of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of Ukraine of samples of pathogens from different regions of Ukraine under the pretext of studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population”:

The next stage of cooperation, according to the SBU, should be the generalization and referral of research results to the Center for Biological Research at the US Defense Ministry, ostensibly to attract American specialists to develop vaccine samples that are maximally adapted to the residents of a particular region. The persistent efforts of the United States to resume the project indicate the intention to establish control over all domestic studies of pathogens of particularly dangerous infectious diseases that can be used for creation or modernization of new types of selective biological weapons. At the same time, it is not excluded that in the conditions of broad rights and powers guaranteed by the program, a foreign party will be able to study its own test systems on the territory of Ukraine, which creates a potential threat to epidemiological and epizootic situations, both in the region and in the country as a whole.

In sum, what the Russians fear about the biolabs is that research has been done with the explicit intention of breaking down the “national biological protection system.”

I have not the slightest doubt that if these claims were being made about the Russians the mainstream media would be creating a state of utter hysteria in the Western population. Already Western propaganda has succeeded in dehumanizing not only the Russians, but anyone who does not go along with the primary main stream media and the Pentagon and Intelligence claims made about the cause, meaning and justification of the war.

For my part, and as I have indicated in various essays for the Postil, I cannot ignore the constant calls for depopulation coming from the World Economic Forum and the likes of such gigantic brains and compassionate people as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari—and I cannot but think that bioweaponry can easily be used for that purpose.

Indeed, I ask myself, if it is necessary to save the planet by killing a few billion people, why wouldn’t our global leaders resort to biological weaponry? Perhaps that weaponry might be used in the most charitable way by simply attacking the reproductive capacities of the weakest of the species — and the weakest would be those who come from nations whose biological protective systems have been weakened through the deliberate release of pathogens.

That is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply posing the question, why would those who openly conspire to achieve the world they want — one with far less “useless people,” and as Harari points out without the least hesitation or sense of shame, most of the world’s population simply no longer have any further use — also not do the deeds that achieve their ends?

One way of doing the culling is to condemn entire peoples by dehumanizing them — initially by taking out nations who have been branded as “monsters,” and when that is not enough simply moving on to the useless.

As for those of you who think the concerns of the Russian “monsters” are just lies and propaganda, you might ask yourself why have they just drafted a proposal urging the UN Security Council to “set up a commission consisting of all members of the Security Council to investigate the claims against the US and Ukraine contained in the complaint of the Russian Federation regarding the compliance with obligations under the [Biological Weapons] Convention in the context of the activities biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” and present a report by November 30, 2022?

Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Clinton demands $1 million from Trump

Samizdat | November 1, 2022

Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton filed court papers on Monday in a bid to compel Donald Trump to pay her more than $1 million. According to the motion, she is demanding compensation for money spent fighting a lawsuit that alleged she had engaged in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by claiming he colluded with Russia.

Clinton’s legal team described Trump’s civil action, which was dismissed earlier this year, as frivolous and “a political stunt,” according to a filing in a federal court in Florida. Lawyers argued that it should result in sanctions in the form of $1.06 million that would be used to cover legal fees and costs.

“A reasonable attorney would never have filed this suit, let alone continued to prosecute it after multiple defendants’ motions to dismiss highlighted its fundamental and incurable defects,” Clinton’s attorneys wrote.

In March, Trump filed a lawsuit alleging that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and a number of other people had entered a malicious conspiracy to accuse his campaign of colluding with Russia in an effort to harm his electoral chances. At the time, Trump claimed the rumors had cost him over $24 million.

However, in September Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, the former US President and Hillary Clinton’s husband, threw out the lawsuit, arguing that it was nothing more than a “political manifesto.” He also noted that Trump filed the suit too late and failed to provide evidence for the alleged conspiracy. The former president has appealed the ruling.

Commenting on Clinton’s move, Trump’s attorney Alina Habba, denied the allegations, describing them as politically motivated. “This motion, conveniently filed one week prior to election day, is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to score political points,” she said in a written statement, as quoted by the Hill.

In 2016, the United States accused Russia of interference in the presidential election to harm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and boost the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump, an allegation which has been vehemently denied by Moscow. US authorities also investigated whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia, but failed to find evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

‘Inflation came from nowhere’ – Lagarde

Samizdat | October 31, 2022

The European Central Bank (ECB) has doubled its key interest rate to the highest level in more than a decade in an attempt to combat soaring inflation, ECB President Christine Lagarde has explained.

In October, the inflation rate in the Eurozone reached 10.7%, according to official preliminary data, released on Monday.

In an interview with Irish state broadcaster RTE on Friday, Lagarde said: “We do it because we are fighting inflation” that had “pretty much come about from nowhere.” She pointed to a speedier-than-expected economic rebound from the pandemic as a cause alongside “the energy crisis caused by Mr. Putin who has decided in an unjustifiable way to invade another country.”

The ECB chief added: “That’s what he [Putin] is trying to do, cause chaos and destroy as much of Europe as he can. This energy crisis is causing massive inflation which we have to defeat.”

She went on to say that “Anybody who is behaving in that way has to be driven by evil forces,” and that the “sick” Russian president is a “terrifying person.”

Discussing her previous meetings with the Russian leader, Lagarde described him as an “unbelievably super-briefed person” with “flashing, freezing eyes.”

After expressing her view, Lagarde however stressed that she’s “just a central banker,” and “shouldn’t be saying all these things.”

On Thursday, the ECB announced another interest rate hike, taking Eurozone rates to the highest level since 2009. According to Lagarde, they are aimed at bringing inflation back to “reasonable levels so the cost of living isn’t as high as it is for people.” In October, inflation across the euro area hit 10.7%, according to preliminary data from Eurostat.

The EU has blamed Russia for the spiraling energy crisis across the continent. However, many economists point to the bloc’s fiscal policy responses as a major reason behind the crisis. Moscow has also criticized the “illogical and often absurd” moves by Western nations, saying that the sanctions imposed by the US, EU, and other countries on Russia have backfired and resulted in a sweeping energy crisis as well as record inflation across the West.

October 31, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Prague protests: local occurrence or indicator of coming unrest across Europe?

By Drago Bosnic | October 31, 2022

As if the political unraveling across the European Union, United Kingdom and other powers of the political West wasn’t bad enough, the people who have become fed up with the disastrous policies of their failing governments are finally taking to the streets. Pushed to the brink of (or beyond) poverty, with soaring food, energy and housing costs, tens of thousands of protesters railed against the policies of the Czech government. Starting on Friday, the residents of Prague took to the streets, demanding the resignation of the Czech government under Prime Minister Petr Fiala, withdrawal from NATO, as well as direct talks and an agreement on future natural gas supplies from Russia.

“This is a new national revival and its goal is for the Czech Republic to be independent,” organizer Ladislav Vrabel stated. “When I see a full square, no one can stop this.”

Demonstrations were not only limited to Prague, but occurred both in the capital city, as well as the second-largest Czech city of Brno. Organized under the slogan of “Czech Republic First,” the protests drew large-scale support from both sides of the political spectrum, as left-wing and right-wing parties joined forces to protest the subservient policies of the government in Prague.

“Russia’s not our enemy, the government of warmongers is the enemy,” one speaker said, according to a report by the Associated Press. Prague has sent munitions, armored vehicles, tanks, artillery systems and other heavy weapons to the Kiev regime and provided approximately 500,000 visas to Ukrainian citizens, along with full benefits. This has caused frustration among millions of Czechs, many of whom are now struggling to afford basic necessities, as their government is wasting increasingly scant resources by sending them to the corrupt Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev. Among the aforementioned requests such as the halt of anti-Russian policies, protest organizers are also demanding that Ukrainian citizens in Czechia not be granted permanent residency status.

This protest was the third in a series of demonstrations organized by a Czech group demanding Prague’s withdrawal from NATO and the establishment of normal ties with Moscow. According to Bloomberg, Prime Minister Petr Fiala’s government has attempted to dismiss the protests as supposedly “inspired by pro-Kremlin propagandist narratives.” The Czech government has been woefully unprepared for the economic fallout of anti-Russian sanctions and policies it was ordered to implement, resulting in the ever-rising costs which have not been tackled despite aid to businesses and household electricity price caps. On the contrary, price controls only backfired, causing shortages and resulting in even greater price hikes.

Despite attempts by the Western mainstream propaganda machine to present the Prague protests as “merely a local occurrence”, the truth is that they are just a relatively small part of a rising wave of discontent across not just the EU, but Europe as a whole. On October 27, just a day before the demonstrations in Prague erupted, tens of thousands protested in France, demanding higher wages to offset the rising costs of living. The strike also included teachers, healthcare providers and railway workers, among thousands of other French citizens. In recent months and weeks, similar protests have been organized in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Austria.

“This is merely the silence before the storm — the discontent is great, and people do not have any sense that the government has a plausible strategy to master the crisis,” German pollster Manfred Güllner told The Wall Street Journal.

At a time when approximately 75% of German families are forced to cut back on energy consumption, a mere 9% of Germans support Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his policies to tackle the escalating energy crisis threatening to destroy the EU’s largest industrial power. Although the protesters in France didn’t put anti-Russian sanctions at the forefront of their demands, German demonstrators have called for an end to these self-harming policies. The massive discontent in Europe will certainly spread all over the world, as hundreds of millions now realize that there is a direct connection between Western sanctions against Russia and their ever-growing economic and financial issues.

It does not take an expert in geopolitical matters to connect the dots and understand how the latest proxy war against Russia is affecting the well-being of the world. The situation in the EU has become so bad now that millions of Ukrainian citizens who have fled to Europe are returning to their (unfortunately) Neo-Nazi junta-run country. According to the latest figures by the International Organization for Migration (IMO), over six million people have gone back, despite the still ongoing conflict. The Kiev regime is now struggling to accommodate everyone and the Neo-Nazi junta officials are urging citizens not to return this winter. Blackouts have become the norm in multiple cities and with the coming sub-zero temperatures heating will be a major concern in the next several months.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

October 31, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

LNG ships waiting for higher EU prices to unload

Samizdat – October 30, 2022

Several ships loaded with liquefied natural gas (LNG) that have been circling off the coast of Spain are likely to stay there until late November, as they wait for European gas prices to go up, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing industry sources.

An LNG tanker traffic jam has been building off the Spanish coast for weeks with vessels waiting to unload their cargo. Spain boasts the largest LNG storage facilities in the European Union.

The glut of LNG off the coast could be part of a trading strategy by suppliers, as ships are waiting until prices increase to unload, industry sources told Reuters.

Natural gas prices are at their lowest level in Europe since June, having dropped 28% in a week, due in part to above-normal temperatures and high inventory levels, as the EU’s gas storage is now nearly 95% full, according to Rystad Energy.

“If one single idling vessel discharges its cargo, the price will immediately collapse by affecting the other cargoes in the queue and this domino effect is so painful in terms of opportunity cost,” one of the sources told Reuters.

Just by waiting to deliver in December rather than November, the difference in profit could be in the order of tens of millions of dollars per shipment, Michelle Wiese Bockmann from the shipping journal Lloyd’s List told the BBC.

The backlog of ships has mainly been attributed to a lack of LNG storage capacity in Europe. EU countries went on an LNG-buying spree over the summer to fill up their reserves ahead of winter in view of reduced supplies from Russia. But, as the bloc has long relied on pipeline gas, the continent’s regasification and storage capacities cannot cope, Reuters explained.

October 30, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Will Ursula von der Leyen be forced to resign, and will her deeds be investigated?

By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 28.10.2022

Europe has been rocked by large-scale protests over the last few weeks, and many politicians and media organizations in the EU see this as a reflection of public dissatisfaction with the policies of the European Commission and especially its head, Ursula von der Leyen. The main concern is the rising cost of living, the rapid increase in energy and food prices, and the anti-Russian policies of the European Commission, which have led to an energy and economic crisis that is affecting not only Europe but many other countries who have committed themselves to a close relationship with Europe.

Always keen to show her unwavering support for Washington and London, in her speech at the inaugural summit of the European Political Community, the President of the European Commission extended a warm welcome to Liz Truss – despite the fact that no-one other than Ursula von der Leyen considers the former British premier’s policies to be a success. As the Daily Express notes, the speech was greeted with an uncomfortable silence.

Internet users in the EU have criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s most recent promises to help the Kiev regime “as long as is necessary” and provide Ukraine with billions upon billions of Euros in credit. Her statements have been attacked on social media as ignoring the interests and wishes of EU citizens, and users have called for her resignation.

Writing on Twitter, the French politician Florian Filippo criticized her call for regular subsidies for Ukraine: “Ursula is completely crazy! Lock her up!”

In an interview with Le journal du Dimanche, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has accused the European Commission of lacking the authority to make decisions on arms purchases. As he explained, the European Commission is an administrative body, and it is unclear on what basis Ursula von der Leyen considers that she has the authority to speak up on matters relating to foreign policy or arms purchases. Just a few days after the beginning of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the President of the European Commission announced that the EU would finance “the purchase and delivery of arms and other military equipment” to Ukraine. Europeans are continually hearing about the need to provide the Kiev regime with billions of euros from EU coffers to buy arms, and they blame Ursula von der Leyen. Nicolas Sarkozy alleges that the EU’s policy in relation to Ukraine was too dependent on “escalation, irritation and thoughtless actions.”

The Israeli television channel i24news and the former Socialist candidate for the French presidency (in the 2007 elections) Ségolène Royal have also recently criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s stance. Ségolène Royal claims that instead of helping Russia to stop the war, the President of the European Commission is lobbying on behalf of the USA’s Ukraine policy and has effectively become a NATO and Pentagon press secretary.

In addition to the criticism’s of her policies, Ursula von der Leyen has also found herself at the center of corruption scandals in recent months. Especially since the beginning of the European public prosecutor’s investigation into EU purchases of COVID-19 vaccines. Public attention in relation to the scandal has centered on the role played by the President of the European Commission, who, as even Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council noted on October 20, “went all out and purchased 4.6 billion(!) COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer pharmaceuticals at a cost of 71 billion (!) euros.” “That is 10 vaccine doses for every EU citizen,” he added.

According to the journal Politico, Ursula von der Leyen has admitted to exchanging text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla while the EU was negotiating the vaccine purchase contract. Two EU supervisory bodies have already accused her of wrongdoing in relation to the purchase, criticizing the Commission for refusing to provide the documents required for the investigation into the matter to proceed further.

However, the Pfizer purchase is not the first scandal that Ursula von der Leyen has found herself involved in. There was another scandal three years ago, when, shortly after a call from the EU elite to “make the process of electing the EU leadership more democratic,” the members of various different political groupings complained that at the beginning of 2019 the heads of the main EU bodies were selected in closed meetings “under cover of night.” The presidency of the European Commission did not go to the leader of the group winning the most votes in the May 2019 elections, but was instead “handed to” Ursula von der Leyen, as Donald Tusk, evidently satisfied that he had done his duty, informed journalists at the end of a two-week EU summit.

This political backroom deal in which the position was clearly reserved for Ursula von der Leyen took place at a time when the EU was supposedly undergoing a “democratic reform.” Since 2014 the so-called leading candidate procedure has been in effect, for the purpose of selecting a new President of the European Commission. Among other requirements, the procedure requires that the candidates from Europe-wide parties who won the largest numbers of votes in European Parliament elections should be given priority when selecting the President of the European Commission.

The reservation of the post for Ursula von der Leyen, the then German Minister of Defense, was highly controversial at the time, even in her native Germany, both among politicians and within the expert community. For example, Markus Söder, at the time head of the Christian Democratic Union, described his views to the DPA press Agency as follows: “Manfred Weber would have been a legitimate President of the European Commission, his election would have been democratic. It is a pity that democracy failed, and the winner was chosen in a behind-the-scenes deal.” The heads of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)-led coalition, in government at the time, also opposed her nomination to the most senior post in the EU. “The decision to award the presidency of the European Commission to the Minister of Defense undoes all the efforts that have been made to strengthen democracy in Europe, take into account citizens’ interests and support the role of the European Parliament,” the SPD leaders claimed in a statement.

Significantly, at the time Ursula von der Leyen did not even take part in the election campaign, did not stand as a candidate in the European elections, and was probably most known for her anti-Russian position and her unquestioning support for Washington. It was most likely that support that played the key role in bringing about her nomination as President of the European Commission.

So, one may ask, what did Ursula von der Leyen do to achieve the honor of being given the post she now occupies? She is the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, a high-ranking politician in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and between 1988 and 1992 she worked as an assistant doctor in the gynecological department of Hanover Medical School. However, in 2016 Hanover Medical School checked her doctoral thesis for plagiarism, and noted its “obvious shortcomings.”

Having raised seven children, she is often informally referred to in her native country as “the mother of Germany.” Her political career began in 1990, when she joined Angela Merkel’s CDU, and in 2005 she was appointed to her first ministerial post, as Minister of Family Affairs and Youth in the Merkel administration. In 2009 she was appointed Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, and in 2013 she became Minister of Defense, a post which she occupied for six years, during which she was involved in regular scandals and responsible for controversial decisions. According to statements by Germany’s three main parties (the Green Party, the Left Party and the Social Democrats), many of the 3,800 contracts concluded during her “management” of the German Armed Forces from 2014 onwards (relating to the restructuring of the Armed Forces and also its IT systems) appear to have been awarded to the “right people,” including relatives and friends, and some contracts may even have involved some form of bribery. Back in 2017 the German newspaper Bild, citing a report by the Federal Audit Office, accused Ursula von der Leyen of being strikingly incompetent during her time as Minister of Defense, when it was revealed that not one German submarine was operational, and less than half of its frigates and tanks and just a third of its military helicopters were in working condition.

With such a “success” record, Ursula von der Leyen was already being seen as a burden on the Armed Forces and the CDU. As, with the elections coming up, there was no suitable free ministerial post she was “nominated” for the presidency of the European Commission – a convenient decision for Germany at the time.

However, as time went by it became clear that the EU could not expect to derive much benefit from her appointment.

For Washington, however, which has no interest in the EU being led by strong politicians following their own line independent of the US, the decision to give Ursula von der Leyen the presidency of the European Commission in 2019 played right into its hands. And as a result she is now promoting the interests, not of European citizens, but of Washington alone, by helping US pharmaceutical companies make huge profits from selling the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine or by providing the US military-industrial complex with millions upon millions of euros in arms orders, paid for by European taxpayers, to support the Kiev regime.

In the present circumstances it will be interesting to see how Ursula von der Leyen’s “career” ends – will she be brought down by the results of investigations into the corruption scandals which she has clearly been involved in, or following demands for her resignation by the European public, who are becoming increasingly critical of her actions…

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

US scales back plan for Russian oil price cap – Report

Samizdat | October 27, 2022

President Joe Biden’s administration has reportedly been forced back to the drawing board on its plan to cap international prices for Russian oil, having failed to secure enough commitments to control how much Moscow is paid for the bulk of its crude exports.

The US and the European Union will likely have to settle for a “loosely policed” pricing cap, enforced by fewer buyers and at a higher price than envisioned, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing unidentified people familiar with the plans. The original goal was to drastically reduce Russia’s oil revenue – the latest effort to punish Moscow for its military offensive in Ukraine – by imposing a strict price lid to which a broad “buyer’s cartel” of nations would adhere.

Instead, only G7 nations and Australia have committed to honoring the price cap, Bloomberg said, attributing failure of the original plan to investor skepticism, volatile financial markets and efforts to tame inflation around the world. The cap level also might need to go higher than a previously targeted range of $40-$60 per barrel.

Biden’s administration has denied that its plan would fall short of throttling Russian oil revenue. “The White House and the administration are staying the course on implementing an effective, strong price cap on Russian oil in coordination with the G7 and other partners,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told Bloomberg in a statement.

Russian officials have said the country won’t sell oil or other commodities under price caps or unprofitable market conditions. Nor will Moscow supply energy to nations that adopt trade policies contradicting the terms of their existing oil and natural gas contracts, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said earlier this month. A cap on crude wouldn’t be viable because prices are driven by the global supply-demand balance, he added.

The G7 price cap is scheduled to go into force on December 5, along with an EU ban on imports of seaborne Russian crude. Reuters reported last week that after December 5, Russia would still be able to ship the vast majority of its oil exports at market prices because it would have ample access to tankers and other services. The outlet cited a US Treasury official as saying that between 80% and 90% of Russian oil would continue to flow to buyers outside the cap mechanism.

Russia would have access not only to its own oil tankers, but also to Chinese and Indian ships, Reuters added. Traders and insurance companies from Russia, Asia and the Middle East would provide the necessary transactional services. Brent crude, a leading international oil benchmark, is currently selling for around $95 per barrel.

October 26, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Norwegian PM for restoration of contacts with Russia: “Nothing good in isolation”

By Ahmed Adel | October 26, 2022

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said that Western countries should not isolate Russia and should instead establish direct communication with Moscow to resolve the exceptionally difficult situation in Ukraine. However, Norway, a NATO member, is also one of the leading countries to oppose Russia through sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military.

“There is nothing good in isolating Russia. It is alarming that today we have so few contacts and direct communication with Russia,” Store told the Norwegian parliament on October 25.

This is an especially surprising statement since Norway has donated 4,000 M72 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, as well as an air defence system, 22 self-propelled artillery vehicles, long-range rocket artillery and armoured vehicles. Norway will also donate the Black Hornet micro-drone system and Hellfire missiles, and will also train Ukrainian soldiers in Britain.

Although Norway is following Washington and Brussels in supporting Ukraine and acting hostile to Moscow, perhaps there is a realization setting in Oslo that the war will not end with the Ukrainian military capturing Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporozhye from Russia. By coming to such a conclusion, the only realistic option left is to call for direct communications with Russia, something the West cut in the false belief that sustained isolation and economic pressure would make Moscow capitulate and end its military operation in Ukraine.

This was of course a naïve belief since the Kremlin has for years attempted to resolve the situation in Donbass through negotiations and discussions, something that Kiev, with the West’s support and backing, never supported. Moscow was forced to take matters into their own hands to protect the Russian-speaking minority from Kiev’s fascistic policies. Although Moscow has taken the military approach, it is still open to honest and open dialogue, but of course with different demands since the situation on the ground has significantly changed.

According to the Norwegian prime minister, the lack of dialogue with Moscow undermines the possibility of reaching a peaceful settlement in Ukraine. He also added that the current political situation was the most difficult since World War II, and it is for this reason as well that communication channels must reopen.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the West that Russia could not be isolated, and this is reflected in the fact that several major countries, including China, India and Brazil, have vocally opposed the idea of imposing unilateral sanctions on Moscow and called for the continuation of dialogue in the interest of peaceful world development.

Sanctions against Russia have led to disruptions in logistical and financial operations and to a spike in energy prices worldwide, pushing many European governments to resort to contingency measures. At the same time, Brussels has been looking for alternatives to Russian natural gas as it has pledged to end its dependence on energy supplies from Russia, thus making Norway all the more important to the EU.

The Scandinavian country is now the EU’s leading natural gas supplier, overtaking Russia. It is not forgotten that the Nord Stream pipelines leaks corresponded with the opening of a new pipeline from Norway to Poland. Although Norway is being heralded as a saviour for energy-struggling Europe, it has been criticised for essentially war profiteering.

“There is no question that the fallout from the war is making Norway richer. The state is a major player in the oil and gas industry. All told, Oslo expects to bring in about $109 billion from the petroleum sector this year — $82 billion more than in 2021. Much of that will go to the country’s sovereign wealth fund, a national nest egg worth more than $1 trillion,” The Washington Post reported.

Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, state secretary at the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, denied that Norway is profiting off the war, stressing that high energy prices “hurt Norway too.” He noted that gas exports to Europe are up 8 percent year over year. “Europe sees that, and it sees that we are a good partner,” Eriksen added.

In this way, Norway has essentially become a big winner from the war in Ukraine as it has now become the main supplier of natural gas to Europe despite charging astronomical prices. However, this is not reflected on ordinary citizen life as Norway is not immune from the effects of the self-sabotaging anti-Russia sanctions.

Complementing the higher electricity bills arriving every month, Norwegians are also experiencing higher prices for almost everything else. State statistics bureau SSB (Statistics Norway) recently reported an 11.3 percent rise in transport costs, a 12.1 percent rise in food and non-alcoholic drinks, an 8.7 percent rise in hotel and restaurant bills and a 7.6 percent rise in prices for household items and maintenance. Norway’s biggest bank, DNB, also reported that its customers are now spending much less money on expensive items.

It is for this reason that Norway, despite making record profits in the energy sector, wants dialogue with Moscow to reopen so that there can be an alleviation in the cost-of-living crisis and other sectors of the economy. Nonetheless, Oslo itself makes little contribution to peace efforts as it maintains anti-Russia sanctions and continues to train, fund, and supply the Ukrainian military.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

October 26, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

New African Generation Has Decided to Refuse Western Domination – African Activist

Samizdat -26.10.2022

Pan-Africanist political leader and activist Kémi Séba has spoken to Sputnik about Africa’s role in the world and its relations with Russia. He believes that it is not for the West to decide whom Africa builds ties with.

Pan-African activist Kémi Séba, present at the Second International Youth Forum “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” held on October 24-26 in Moscow, in an interview spoke to Sputnik about the role of Africa in the new world order.

“In this multipolar world, we are witnessing an upheaval in the sense that a new African generation, of which I am a part, has decided to take its destiny into its own hands and to refuse the domination of the West in order to assume its own destiny,” he said.

According to Mr. Séba, “Africa can become a new center of gravity.”

‘Africa is the Sole Messiah of its Destiny’

Having not forgotten the tenets of colonialism, Africa rejects “the neo-liberal Western dictatorship of the Western elite.” The anti-French manifestations that are taking place in several countries on the continent prove that.

“The French government is so arrogant and so negrophobic that it thinks that the protests that are taking place today are just the result of Russian manipulation generating anti-French sentiment. They are so convinced that everything they do is good that they are unable to accept that the colonized people will eventually want to revolt. It is not the Russians who have created this feeling. It is we who created it,” Kémi Séba explained.

He further added: “Africa is the sole Messiah of its destiny.”

Partnership with Russia

According to Mr. Séba, “it is not up to the West to determine with whom Africa should build strong relationships.”

“We want to build relationships with nations that are opposed to Western hegemony. Russia is one of them. But it is not the only one, there is Venezuela, Cuba, China, Turkey, and Iran. They are all part of the challenge process.”

As for the presence of Russian flags, the activist also sees it as “a kind of protest, a provocation of the African peoples because they know that Russia is now a country hated by the Western elites.” “But this does not mean that Russia is our Messiah. We are the Messiahs of our own.”

October 26, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

German Energy Apocalypse Update VII

eugyppius – October 25, 2022

The only published footage of the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines, featured on my Nord Stream Conspiracy Thread, turns out to come from Expressen, a Swedish newspaper. Their reporters hired undersea drone operators and took a boat out to the site of the explosions off the island of Bornholm. There, they found a sizeable crater and 50 metres of missing pipeline. That this is how the images should have made their way to us, rather than through any official path, speaks volumes about the eagerness of Swedish authorities to suppress this story.

Protests against the insane energy policy of the German government are gathering momentum, particularly in the East; sporadic reports are even appearing in major media outlets now. This is surely one reason that the Minister President of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, continues to stray from official CDU talking points, calling for negotiated peace in Ukraine and likening EU sanctions to a “tsunami” threatening the German economy.

Feared gas shortages are causing chaos as customers rush to change suppliers in search of better prices, or because their current contracts have been cancelled. Several municipal utilities have flatly stopped accepting new customers, but this option is not available to the so-called Grundversorger or “basic suppliers”—the utilities that supply the majority of gas in their region. These are legally bound to take all comers, and many of them are already having difficulty meeting sudden surges in demand.

Their day-to-day solvency may also soon be a problem:

[I]t is not only the procurement prices that have risen sharply, but also the interim financing costs—that is, the sum with which the municipal utilities must bridge the time from the purchase of gas to the onward sale to the customer, and to the increase in customers’ instalment payments, [an Association of Municipal Enterprises] spokesman explained. “Both together increase the liquidity needs of the municipal utilities, and this in turn affects their ability to supply customers with electricity and gas.”

Who knows how all this will play out, and what effect (if any) proposed price limits on electricity and gas will have on the markets, but I have a crazy vision of a near-future dystopia, where a minority of wealthy customers who have maintained wildly expensive contracts with alternate providers can still heat their homes, while everyone else deals with constant outages and ad-hoc rationing schemes.

Zelensky’s economic advisor has announced that he expects the Federal Republic to contribute 500 million dollars every month to Ukraine’s defence. That sounds like a lot, but we must remember that Germany’s antigen testing program, at its height, cost around a billion Euros a month. The government has pissing away money on crazy things for a long time now.

A survey of German companies, the majority of them small businesses, shows that 25% (up from 14% four months ago) are considering whether to lay off employees, and that 90% are planning to raise prices further than they already have. Almost six in ten are delaying planned investments.

“We have been seeing a creeping shift in industrial production for some time now,” says Rainer Kirchdörfer, Chairman of the Family Business Foundation [which conducted the survey]. “We will only recognise the deindustrialisation and loss of prosperity years from now, and by then it will be irreversible.”

The economic chaos has hit the chemical industry especially hard, and among the early shortages are iron and aluminium salts, crucial precipitating agents used in wastewater treatment. Four federal states have already relaxed their rules on water purification. Chemicals necessary for the treatment of drinking water are also increasingly scarce.

Can’t we just increase our production of biogas to end our dependence on Russia and save the climate at the same time, asks the drooling knuckle-dragging morons at Westdeutscher Rundfunk ?

Overall, the share of biomethane in the German gas market could triple, according to a study by the German Biomass Research Centre in Leipzig. The Capital Bioenergy Office says in a statement that biogas plants could offset about 4 percent of Russian natural gas imports in the short term. It also says it is possible for biogas to provide 46% of the electricity from gas-fired power plants.

So, if we put all of our grain into power production, we have the prospect not only of freezing to death, but of starving to death too. I’m glad state media are investigating this promising angle.

Finally, Business Insider has discovered that the real victims of the gas crisis won’t be young children in fragile health or elderly pensioners on fixed incomes, but female professionals. Ordinances requiring offices to set thermostats at 19C, according to some garbage study, will cognitively disadvantage women, while (even worse) advantaging men, who bizarrely are alleged to perform their best at this precise temperature. Happily, though, Tagesschau has consulted Dr. Georg Ertl from University Hospital at Würzburg, who believes this unfortunate sexism, brought upon us by the furtherance of liberal democracy, can be countered by … caps and stockings.

October 25, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Seize, not freeze: EU outlines plans for Russian assets

Samizdat – October 25, 2022

The EU seeks to outright confiscate Russian assets rather than just freeze them, but the bloc has yet to lay the legal groundwork for doing so, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

The official delivered her remarks during a conference devoted to the rebuilding of Ukraine, which was attended by a number of Kiev’s prominent international donors.

“Our aim is not only to freeze, but to seize the assets,” she said, although cautioning that establishing a legal base for such a move is “not trivial.”

According to von der Leyen, the EU has created a task force that includes various international experts “not only to map out what has been frozen,” but also to see what the legal preconditions would be for seizing Russian assets and using them for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“The will is there, but legally it is not trivial, there is still a lot of work to reach that goal,” she reiterated, noting that the EU adheres to the rule of law, and therefore this process has to be “legally sound.”

Responding to von der Leyen’s remarks, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that in reality the EU Commission president wants Russia to “exhaust itself being dragged through courts” while trying to retrieve its funds.

During the conference, von der Leyen stated that the World Bank had estimated the cost of the damage to Ukraine at €350 billion ($345 billion). Meanwhile, after Russia launched its military campaign in Ukraine in late February, a multinational task force froze $30 billion in funds belonging to Russian individuals, as well as $300 billion in assets of Russia’s central bank.

Russia strongly criticized the freezing of the funds, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that the West had essentially committed theft.

Western officials have repeatedly expressed the desire to confiscate Russian assets to benefit Ukraine. However, in July, during another conference on rebuilding Ukraine, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis opposed such a move, arguing that it would establish a dangerous precedent.

“You have to ensure the citizens are protected against the power of the state. This is what we call liberal democracies,” he said at the time.

October 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Odysee blocks French versions of Russia Today after legal demand

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2022

US-based online video sharing platform  has blocked the French versions of Russian state-run news outlets Sputnik and RT after a legal order out of .

“If we want to do business in another country we have to abide by their laws or they shut us down. RT FR and its affiliates are illegal in France. If you want to still watch them from France, use VPN, Odysee tweeted.

Several months ago, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Russia, including banning RT and Sputnik from being broadcast in member countries. The two news outlets were accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the invasion of .

The channels are not allowed on television or online in EU countries. However, they have been circumventing the sanctions through online platforms that are not based in the EU.

A week ago, France’s President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France is struggling with completely banning Sputnik and RT.

The platform is still broadcasting the English versions of both channels.

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment