Dr Ros Jones, the founder of CCVAC and long-term critic of the Government’s advisory body on vaccine policy JCVI, has just written to them again to ask why, in defiance of the evidence, are they recommending an autumn booster for healthy 12-64s who live with an immunocompromised household member. Here she explains her concern.
If you think this is irrelevant for most healthy children, it is not. The proposed schedule, though excluding the majority of healthy under-64s, recommends that perfectly healthy 12-64s get a booster if they are a household contact of someone with immunosuppression, for example someone who has been under cancer treatment. Once again guilt is being exploited. Whose needs do parents prioritise, their healthy teenage son or daughter or their elderly immunocompromised mothers and fathers? The simple answer is they have to do neither: their child does not need a booster for his or her own health and it is abundantly clear that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, and may well have the opposite effect. There is good evidence that repeated boosters actually increase the likelihood of infection, particularly in the first week or two after vaccination, quite apart from all the other immediate and long-term potential risks of harm.
This is why I, with more than one hundred health professionals and academics, have once again written to Professor Wei Shen Lim, chairman of the JCVI’s Covid-19 committee, to point out the total lack of logic or indeed ethics in the current guidelines. The letter is published below and can also be found on the Hart group website here: Professor Lim, how can boosters protect others? – HART (hartgroup.org)
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4th September 2023
Professor Wei Shen Lim and all members, Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation
Rt Hon Stephen Barclay MP, Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care
cc Dr Camilla Kingdon, President, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
Dear Professor Lim and Mr Barclay,
re: JCVI advice for Covid-19 vaccination of healthy young adults if living with an immunocompromised household member
I, and many of my co-signatories, have written to you on several occasions since May 2021[i], when you were first deliberating over whether to recommend Covid-19 gene-based vaccines for healthy children, given the lack of any robust safety data on these new mRNA technologies and the acknowledged low impact of SARS-CoV-2 on children.
It is very gratifying to see that this autumn’s booster programme [ii] has now been dropped for almost all healthy under-65s. However, there is one group still being offered a booster that causes us serious concern, namely the offer of a booster to healthy over-12s if they have an immunocompromised household member. We set out our reasons below.
1. It is clear that Covid-19 vaccines are failing to prevent infection by or transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
2. There is now good evidence that multiple boosters actually increase the likelihood of a SARS-CoV-2 infection [iii].
3. There is good evidence of a specific rise in infection risk in the first 7-10 days after vaccination, thus putting family members at increased rather than reduced risk [iv],[v].
4. The more recent omicron variants are poorly covered by the original vaccines, but even the newer bivalent boosters generate a much lower response against the non-Wuhan sequences in the vaccines, indicative of immune imprinting [vi].
5. The potential benefit of vaccination now for healthy young adults is low, and for children is effectively zero, given the poor efficacy of the vaccines and the high prevalence of naturally-acquired immunity [vii].
6. The safety profile of these vaccines is woefully inadequate for use in a healthy low-risk population, especially children, giving a poor risk : benefit balance. The hazard of myocarditis, recognised early on as an increased risk in younger age groups [viii], has still been poorly delineated, but risks as high as 1 in 25 are reported for subclinical myocarditis in a recent study from Switzerland [ix], confirming similar findings from Thailand. Although symptoms usually resolve quickly, scarring has been demonstrated on cardiac MRI scans [x] and has been found to persist at 6-12-month follow-up [xi]. Pfizer’s own 5-year follow-up study is not due to report until 2027; likewise a large FDA-sponsored study in the US [xii].
7. Many other adverse effects have been reported and listed in our previous letters [xiii], [xiv], perhaps the most worrying of which is the deleterious effect on the immune system [xv],[xvi]. Basic pharmacokinetics of these products are only just being reported, with a paper this week, as we write, reporting findings of vaccine-derived spike protein persisting in the circulation for many months (or longer) after vaccination [xvii],[xviii]; with serious implications for prolonged effects of any vaccine injuries.
8. The issue of excess all-cause deaths in younger age groups in 2022 and 2023 has yet to be properly investigated and a link to vaccines cannot be ruled out until this is done[xix].
9. Even if there was good evidence that vaccination could protect vulnerable household contacts, there would be major ethical concerns around asking children to take a vaccine with any potential risks of harm, to protect family members. The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights [xx]Article 4 and Article 7 make it clear that all medical interventions must be in the best interest of the individual concerned, particularly in the case of children who are not able to give consent. If a booster was in the best interests of a healthy 12-17-year-old, then surely the JCVI would be recommending it for all, but it is clear that these children are being offered the vaccine merely in a likely unsuccessful attempt to benefit other household members.
10. Whilst it may be argued that technically these products have now been approved and are therefore no longer a research tool, these ethical principles and the precautionary principle must still apply, especially since the approval itself is still based on much less evidence than would be expected for other drugs.
Please could you urgently provide the following, under a FOI request:
minutes of the meetings at which these decisions were made;
calculations of numbers of healthy 12-17-year-olds (and of all household members aged 12-64) needed to vaccinate to prevent the hospitalisation of one vulnerable family member;
any legal advice taken on how these unnecessary booster doses to children comply with UK and international law.
We look forward to hearing from you as a matter of urgency before the commencement of the vaccine booster rollout to healthy 12-17-year-olds .
Yours sincerely
Dr Rosamond Jones, MD, FRCPCH, retired consultant paediatrician, convenor of CCVAC (Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council) and many others….
Professor Anthony J Brookes, Professor of Genomics & Health Data Science, University of Leicester
Professor Angus Dalgleish, MD, FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath, FMedSci, Professor of Oncology, University of London; Principal, Institute for Cancer Vaccines & Immunotherapy
Professor Richard Ennos, MA, PhD. Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Professor John A Fairclough, BM BS, BMed Sci, FRCS, FFSEM(UK), Professor Emeritus, Honorary Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Professor David Livermore, BSc, PhD, retired Professor of Medical Microbiology
Professor Karol Sikora, MA, MBBChir, PhD, FRCR, FRCP, FFPM, Honorary Professor of Professional Practice, Buckingham University
Professor Roger Watson, FRCP Edin, FRCN, FAAN, Honorary Professor of Nursing, University of Hull
Professor Keith Willison, PhD, Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial, London
Lord Moonie, MBChB, MRCPsych, MFCM, MSc, House of Lords, former parliamentary under-secretary of state 2001-2003, former consultant in Public Health Medicine
Dr Roland Salmon, MBBS, MRCGP, FFPH, former Director, Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (Wales)
Dr Ali Ajaz, Consultant Psychiatrist
Dr Shiraz Akram, BDS, Dental surgeon
Dr Victoria Anderson, MBChB, MRCGP, MRCPCH, DRCOG, General Practitioner
Julie Annakin, RN, Immunisation Specialist Nurse
Wendy Armstrong, Practice Nurse
Helen Auburn, Dip ION, MBANT, NTCC, CNHC, Registered Nutritional Therapist
Dr Ancha Bala-Joof, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Michael Bazlinton, MBChB, MRCGP, DCH, General Practitioner
Dr Mark A Bell, MBChB, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, UK
Dr Michael D Bell, MBChB, MRCGP, retired General Practitioner
Dr Ashvy Bhardwaj, MBBS, DRCOG, MRCGP (2018)
Dr Alan Black, MBBS, MSc, DipPharmMed, Retired Pharmaceutical Physician
Dr Gillian Breese, BSc, MB ChB, DFFP, DTM&H, General Practitioner
Dr Ian Bridges, MBBS, retired General Practitioner
Dr Emma Brierly, MBBS, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Elizabeth Burton, MB ChB, Retired General Practitioner
Dr David Cartland, MBChB, BMedSci, General practitioner
Dr Peter Chan, BM, MRCS, MRCGP, NLP, General Practitioner, Functional Medicine Practitioner
Dr Bernard Choi, MBBS, MRCGP, DCH, DRCOG, General Practitioner
Michael Cockayne, MSc, PGDip, SCPHNOH, BA, RN, Occupational Health Practitioner
Mr Ian F Comaish, MA, BM BCh, FRCOphth, FRANZCO, Consultant ophthalmologist
James Cook, BN, MPH, NHS Registered Nurse
Dr Clare Craig, BMBCh, FRCPath, Pathologist
Dr David Critchley, BSc, PhD, 32 years in pharmaceutical R&D as a clinical research scientist
Dr Sue de Lacy, MBBS, MRCGP, AFMCP UK, Integrative Medicine Doctor
Dr Christine Dewbury, retired General Practitioner
Mr Keith Dewbury, retired Consultant Radiologist
Dr Jayne Donegan, MBBS, DRCOG, DCH, DFFP, MRCGP, homeopathic practitioner, retired NHS GP
Dr Damien Downing, MBBS, MRSB, private physician
Dr Jonathan Eastwood, BSc, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Jonathan Engler, MBChB, LlB (hons), DipPharmMed
Dr Elizabeth Evans, MA(Cantab), MBBS, DRCOG, Director UKMFA
Dr Chris Exley, PhD FRSB, retired professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry
Dr Brian Fitzsimons, MBChB, DipOccMed, FRCGP, General Practitioner, Occupational Health Physician, Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Practitioner
Dr John Flack, BPharm, PhD. Retired Director of Safety Evaluation at Beecham Pharmaceuticals 1980-1989 and Senior Vice-president for Drug Discovery 1990-92 SmithKline Beecham
Dr Charles Forsyth, MBBS, FFHom, Ecological and Homeopathic Physician (Retired)
Dr Sheena Fraser, MBChB, MRCGP (2003), Dip BSLM, General Practitioner
Sophie Gidet, RM, Midwife
Dr Jenny Goodman, MA, MBChB, Ecological Medicine
Dr Ali Haggett, Mental health community work, 3rd sector, former lecturer in the history of medicine
Mr David Halpin, MBBS, FRCS, Orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, retired
Alex Hicks, MEng, MCIPS, Compliance Director (Supply Chain)
Mr Anthony Hinton, MBChB, FRCS, Consultant ENT surgeon, London
Dr Richard House, PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CertCouns, Chartered Psychologist, former senior lecturer in Psychology (Roehampton) and Early Childhood (Winchester), retired psychotherapist
Dr Keith Johnson, DPhil, former patents officer
Dr Timothy Kelly, MB BCh BSc, NHS doctor
Dr Tanya Klymenko, PhD, FHEA, FIBMS, Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences
Dr Caroline Lapworth, MB ChB, General Practitioner
Dr Branko Latinkic, BSc, PhD, Molecular Biologist
Dr Theresa Lawrie, MBBCh, PhD, Director, Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd
Dr Jason Lester, MRCP, FRCR, Consultant Clinical Oncologist
Dr Felicity Lillingstone, IMD DHS PhD ANP, Doctor, Urgent Care, Research Fellow
Dr Nichola Ling, MBBS, MRCOG, Consultant obstetrician and digital advisor to NHS England
Dr C Geoffrey Maidment, MD, FRCP, retired consultant physician
Mr Ahmad K Malik, FRCS (Tr & Orth), Dip Med Sport, Consultant Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Ayiesha Malik, MBChB, General Practitioner
Dr Kulvinder S. Manik MBChB, MRCGP, MA(Cantab), LLM, Gray’s Inn
Dr Fiona Martindale, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner in out-of-hours
Julie Maxwell, MBBCh, MRCPCH, Associate Specialist Community Paediatrician
Dr Fatou Mbow, MD(Italy), MRCGP, DFFP, General Practitioner
Dr Sam McBride, BSc(Hons) Medical Microbiology & Immunobiology, MBBCh BAO, MSc in Clinical Gerontology, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, FRCP(Edinburgh), NHS Emergency Medicine & geriatrics
Kaira McCallum, BSc, retired pharmacist, Director of strategy UKMFA
Mr Ian McDermott, MBBS, MS, FRCS(Tr&Orth), FFSEM(UK), Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Janet Menage, MA, MBChB, retired General Practitioner
Dr Franziska Meuschel, MD, ND, PhD Affiliations, IDF, BSEM, Nutritional, Environmental and Integrated Medicine
Dr Scott Mitchell, MBChB, MRCS, Associate Specialist, Emergency Medicine
Dr Alistair J Montgomery, MBChB, MRCGP, DRCOG, retired General Practitioner
Dr Alan Mordue, MBChB, FFPH, Retired Consultant in Public Health Medicine & Epidemiology
Margaret Moss, MA(Cantab), CBiol, MRSB, Director, The Nutrition and Allergy Clinic, Cheshire
Dr Claire Mottram, BSc Hons, MBChB, Doctor in General Practice
Dr Greta Mushet, MBChB, MRCPsych, retired Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy
Dr Angela Musso, MD, MRCGP, DRCOG, FRACGP, MFPC, General Practitioner
Dr Sarah Myhill, MBBS, Dip NM, Retired GP, Independent Naturopathic Physician
[iii] Shrestha NK, Burke PC, Nowacki AS et al. Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Bivalent Vaccine, Open Forum Infectious Diseases 2023;10 (6): doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofad209
[iv] Shrotri M, Krutikov M, Palmer T et al. Vaccine effectiveness of the first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and BNT162b2 against SARS-CoV-2 infection in residents of long-term care facilities in England (VIVALDI): a prospective cohort study. Lancet Infect Dis. 2021. doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00289-9
[vi] Fujita S, Uriu K, Pan L et al. Impact of Imprinted Immunity Induced by mRNA Vaccination in an Experimental Animal Model, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2023;, jiad230, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiad230
[ix] Buergin N, Lopez-Ayala P, Hirsiger JR et al. Sex-specific differences in myocardial injury incidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273 booster vaccination. European Journal of Heart Failure 2023. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejhf.2978
[x] Jain SS, Steele JM, Fonseca B et al. COVID-19 Vaccination–Associated Myocarditis in Adolescents. Pediatrics 2021; 148 (5): e2021053427. doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-053427
[xv] Uversky VN, Redwan EM, Makis W, Rubio-Casillas A.IgG4 Antibodies Induced by mRNA Vaccines Generate Immune Tolerance to SARS-CoV-2’spike Protein by Suppressing the Immune System. Vaccines 2023; 11(5): 991. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11050991
[xvi] Noé A, Dang TD, Axelrad C et al. BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination in children alters cytokine responses to heterologous pathogens and Toll-like receptor agonists. Front Immunol 2023; 14:1242380. doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2023.1242380
[xvii] Castruita JAS, Schneider UV, Mollerup S et al. SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after COVID-19 vaccination. APMIS 2023; 131: 128-132. https://doi.org/10.1111/apm.13294
[xviii] Brogna C, Cristoni S, Marino G et al.Detection of recombinant Spike protein in the blood of individuals vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2: Possible molecular mechanisms. Proteomics Clinical Applications 2023; https://doi.org/10.1002/prca.202300048
Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposé by the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.”
Perhaps predictably, the report makes no mention of evidence implicating Pashinsky in the 2014 massacre of 70 anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square, an incident which pro-Western forces used to consummate their coup d’etat against then-President Viktor Yanukovych.
In an August 12 report on Ukraine’s new weapons-sourcing strategy, the New York Times alleged that “out of desperation,” Kiev had no option but to adopt increasingly amoral tactics. The shift, they say, has driven up prices of lethal imports at an exponential rate, “and added layer upon layer of profit-making” for the benefit of unscrupulous speculators like Pashinsky.
According to the Times, the strategy is simple: Pashinksy “buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then “sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more”:
“With each transaction, prices rise – as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates – until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most,” the Times explained, adding that while using multiple brokers may technically be legal, “it is a time-tested way to inflate profits.”
As the seemingly endless supply of cash from Western taxpayers provides a bonanza for arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, it similarly benefits war profiteers like Pashinsky. His company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, “reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million” — a whopping 12,500% increase from its $2.8 million in sales the year before the war.
Pashinsky is not the only racketeer benefitting from the elimination of anti-corruption measures in wartime Ukraine. Several suppliers previously placed on an official blacklist after they “ripped off the military” are now free to sell again, according to the Times investigation. The outlet downplayed this as an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary measure.
“In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption [sic] policies,” the Times asserted, describing “the re-emergence of figures like Mr. Pashinsky” as “one reason the American and British governments are buying ammunition for Ukraine rather than simply handing over money”:
“European and American officials are loath to discuss Mr. Pashinsky, for fear of playing into Russia’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced.”
However, even the seemingly critical Times report overlooks a key aspect of Pashinsky’s unsavory biography. Conspicuously absent from the coverage was any explanation of his role in carrying out the infamous massacre of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014.
A defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, the death of 70 at the hands of mysterious snipers triggered an avalanche of international outrage that led directly to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Even today, these killings officially remain unsolved.
However, firsthand testimony by individuals who claimed to have helped carry out the false flag attack suggest Kiev’s most prolific gun runner was intimately involved in the grisly affair.
Maidan massacre organizer ‘takes no prisoners’
In November 2017, Italy’s Matrix TV channel published eyewitness accounts by three Georgians who say they were ordered to kill protesters by Mamuka Mamulashvili. Then the top-ranking military aide to Georgian president Mikhael Saakashvili, Mamulashvili later founded the infamous mercenary brigade known as the Georgian Legion, whose fighters were widely condemned after they published a gruesome video of themselves gleefully executing unarmed and bound Russian soldiers in April 2022.
The documentary, “Ukraine: The Hidden Truth,” features an Italian journalist’s interviews with three Georgian fighters allegedly sent to orchestrate the coup. All described Pashinsky as a key organizer and executor of the Maidan massacre, even alleging the corrupt arms dealers provided weapons and selected specific targets. The film also featured footage of him personally evacuating a shooter from the Square, after they had been caught with a rifle and a scope by protesters and surrounded.
One of the Georgian fighters recalled how he and his two associates arrived in Kiev in January, “to arrange provocations to push the police to charge the crowd.” For almost a month, however, “there were not many weapons around,” and “molotov [cocktails], shields and sticks were used to the maximum.”
This changed around mid-February, they said, when Mamualashvili personally visited them alongside a US soldier named Brian Christopher Boyenger, a former officer and sniper in the 101st Airborne Division, who personally gave them orders they “had to follow.”
A documentary by Italy’s Matrix channel contains eyewitness testimony implicating an American military instructor in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan massacre.
Pashinky then personally moved them along with sniper rifles and ammunition to buildings overlooking Maidan Square, they alleged. At that point, Mamualashvili reportedly insisted that “we have to start shooting, so much, to sow some chaos.”
So it was that the Georgian fighters “started shooting two or three shots at a time” into the crowd below, having been ordered to “shoot the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what.” Once the killing was over, Boyenger moved to the Donbas front to fight in the ranks of the Georgian Legion, which Mamulashvili commands to this day.
In the meantime, Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Boiko, who headed the civic council of the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine after Maidan, has alleged that in order to obscure his role, Pashinsky personally hand-picked the figures leading the official investigation into the massacre, and even bribed the prosecutor who headed it.
Despite these shocking claims, Pashinsky’s involvement in the Maidan massacre has never been officially investigated, let alone punished, and his most recent experiences with the Ukrainian judicial system suggest it is unlikely to be heavily scrutinized by officials in Kiev. While a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, he was arrested for shooting and wounding a pedestrian in a traffic-related dispute, but was ultimately acquitted in 2021.
When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about his role in the Maidan massacre, the arms dealer warned that they would be tracked down in their home country, where his associates would “tear them apart.” They could be forgiven for believing it was not an idle threat; there is a troubling tendency for Pashinky’s detractors to end up viciously beaten or shot dead in the street.
The US appears to be less and less concerned about the risks of escalation in its proxy conflict with Russia. In yet another irresponsible and anti-humanitarian maneuver, the Biden government announced its decision to send depleted uranium (DU) weapons to the Kiev regime. As is well known, these weapons are extremely dangerous for everyone involved in the conflict, including the soldiers who use them. But the western side does not seem to care about these issues, planning only to prolong hostilities as long as possible.
The announcement was made on September 6, with Pentagon’s spokespersons informing the media that DU munitions will be included in a new military aid package valued at 175 million dollars. The munitions are expected to be used on more than thirty M1 Abrams tanks previously shipped to Ukraine. In addition to radioactive weapons, artillery, anti-tank equipment and other types of arms are also included in the package.
Although the US has already taken several escalating measures and violated many Russian red lines, this is the first time that the country has announced its intention to send radioactive shells to Ukraine. So far, only the UK has sent DU weapons to Kiev. With the US assisting in this supply, the situation worsens significantly, removing any hope of easing tensions in the short term.
As well known, the effects of these weapons on human health are disastrous. There are several reports about the negative impact of DU ammunition on the lives of soldiers and civilians in the regions where it was used. Cancer, fetal deformity, deficiency of fertility and several other diseases are linked with the handling of DU ammunition. Commenting on the arrival of these weapons in Ukraine months ago, Doug Weir, an expert linked to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, explained that “[DU munitions] fragment and burn, generating chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate that poses an inhalational risk to people.”
Despite evidence of health problems caused by DU arms, they are considered “low” risk by the British and Americans. This is why they were used on a large scale in NATO’s invasions against Serbia and Iraq, generating thousands of victims. The excuse for considering them “low risk” is that depleted uranium has a low radiation level, but this does not appear to be a solid argument, as obviously it does not have to be highly radioactive to be toxic and dangerous to human health.
Another important aspect to be discussed is how to classify these weapons according to international law. Since they are radioactive, there are experts who believe it appropriate to classify them in the same way as nuclear weapons. Other experts consider this interpretation exaggerated, since the radiation level of DU ammunition is low, but even so, there seems to be a consensus that the correct thing would be to ban them given their risks and their little strategic relevance.
These ammunitions are generally used to pierce armor vehicles and hit tanks. Despite giving a certain advantage to the side that uses them, their role can normally be performed on the battlefield by other types of weapons, which do not emit substances that are so toxic to human health. Russia, for example, has been efficient in neutralizing enemy tanks using artillery, drones and mines, without any radioactive substance. So, these weapons are obviously replaceable by other less dangerous ones, which is why they should be banned once and for all.
In addition to a lack of concern for human health and the environment, the American attitude also reflects a kind of “despair”. The US is running out of conventional weapons to send to Kiev, which is why it has recently started sending banned weapons, such as cluster munitions, and now even radioactive ones, such as DU. With the massive destruction of NATO equipment on the battlefield, Washington is becoming unable to continue producing conventional weapons for its own forces and for Kiev simultaneously, so it is now turning to controversial and illegal arms in the Ukrainian aid packages.
On Russia’s side, the stance remains one of avoiding escalation and trying to neutralize the radioactive threat with high-precision strikes. Most of the DU ammunition previously supplied by the British was prevented from being used on the battlefield due to the Russian attack on Khmelnitski in May, which destroyed the depot where the weapons were stored. With this kind of high-precision strike, Moscow prevents these ammunitions from being used against innocent civilians, who are the main targets of the Kiev regime.
The Russian response could be much tougher, even nuclear, since DU ammunition can be considered nuclear weapons, as they do not have specific regulation in international law. However, unlike the West, Moscow continues to maintain a posture of avoiding escalation as much as possible.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
The UN condemned the use of depleted uranium ammunition on Wednesday, after the US government said it would send Ukraine a number of such rounds for M1 Abrams tanks as part of a $175-million military aid package.
“We are against the use of depleted uranium ammunition anywhere in the world,” Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told TASS.
Haq’s comments came after the Pentagon revealed that an unspecified number of 120mm DU rounds will be sent to Ukraine as part of the newest package of military assistance. The anti-tank rounds are intended for use by the 30-odd M1 Abrams tanks promised to Kiev by the White House in January. The first batch of tanks are supposed to be delivered later this month.
Washington is following in London’s footsteps in providing the controversial munitions to Kiev. The UK sent a number of DU rounds to Ukraine earlier this year, intended for use with its Challenger 2 tanks. The delivery of DU ammunition was teased by the Wall Street Journal in June and leaked to Reuterslast week.
The British military dismissed Moscow’s objections to the use of the toxic heavy metal by saying the ammunition had “nothing to do with nuclear weapons or capabilities.” The US has also insisted the munitions are not radioactive, citing studies by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that DU residue “does not pose a radiological hazard to the population of the affected regions.”
Critics who seek to ban DU ammunition have pointed to skyrocketing rates of cancer and birth defects in places like Iraq and Serbia, claiming that uranium dust is toxic when handled or inhaled.
Anonymous British and American officials have glibly dismissed Russian concerns about environmental contamination, suggesting instead that Moscow was afraid of the “highly effective” rounds.
The US and its allies have sent over $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and military equipment to Ukraine over the past 18 months, while insisting that this does not make them a party to the conflict. These deliveries have included cluster munitions banned by most NATO members. Ukraine reportedly has to account for their use directly to the Pentagon. Russia has documented multiple instances in which such ordnance was used against civilian targets.
“Freedom of speech, not reach,” is taking effect more than ever as Twitter (“X”) regresses to its 1.0 days. Ever since Elon Musk hired CEO Linda Yaccarino, who has close ties to the World Economic Forum, things have taken a turn for the worse.
In short, “lawful but awful” accounts and external links (especially Substack) are getting brutally deboosted. And permanent suspensions, which were promised to be reserved for unlawful speech only, have made a big comeback.
Now, Twitter (“X”) is taking further action by making undesirable videos unplayable.
After this article garnered lots of attention, the video in the tweet is now working for many people, but not everyone. X has not personally reached out or made a comment on why the video became unplayable several hours after it was uploaded.
Users also reported X was “blocking” them from retweeting. Now, that’s something reminiscent of 2021 and early 2022 — BEFORE Elon took over the platform. So, this is concerning.
So, what did Robert Kennedy Jr. say that crossed the line?
The video was a clip of RFK Jr. breaking down the Pfizer clinical trials with podcast host Brian Rose. And what he exposed, according to Pfizer’s own data, was that people who received Pfizer’s COVID vaccine showed a 23.5% GREATER likelihood of dying than the placebo group after six months.
• In the Pfizer clinical trials, they gave 22,000 people two COVID injections and 22,000 people fake vaccines.
• Of the 44,000 in total, one person died of COVID in the vaccine group, and two people died of COVID in the placebo group. So Pfizer, with the misleading measure of relative risk reduction, called their vaccine “100% effective” because two is 100% greater than one. But from the angle of absolute risk, it took 22,000 vaccines to save just one life from COVID.
• And over a 6-month period, 21 of the vaccinated people died of all causes, whereas only 17 people died in the placebo group, a 23.5% difference.
So, what was killing those people in the vaccine group?
“It was cardiac arrest,” answered Kennedy.
“There were five cardiac arrest deaths in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo group. What that means is that if you take that vaccine, you’re [five times] more likely to die from a fatal cardiac arrest over the next six months than if you don’t. What it also means is that for every life they save by preventing a death from COVID, they are killing four people from cardiac arrest.”
“The all-cause mortality of the vaccine group was 23% higher than the all-cause mortality of the placebo group. And what do we have today currently running in the US for excess mortality? 23%, according to our numbers. I just find that curious.”
So when Pfizer presented this data to the FDA, the FDA was supposed to assess all-cause mortality, give Pfizer’s vaccine a failing grade, tell them to make a better product, and not come back until they could show it saves more lives than it kills. But instead, they rubberstamped the shots through, gave them the green light, and fast-tracked a vaccination campaign that inoculated the world with 13.46 billion doses of this stuff.
Data analyst Edward Dowd corroborated Kennedy’s findings when he did his own deep dive on the Pfizer clinical trials.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has a dedicated assassination program responsible for taking out Russian “collaborators,” the former head of the agency, Valentin Nalivaichenko, has claimed in an interview with the Economist.
According to the former official, the special SBU division dates back to at least 2015 and was formed from the elite fifth counterintelligence directorate, after Ukraine’s leaders at the time decided that imprisoning people was not enough.
“We reluctantly came to the conclusion that we needed to eliminate people,” Nalivaichenko told the British magazine.
The Economist noted that the unit has been linked to the assassinations of Donbass commanders such as Mikhail Tolstykh, aka ‘Givi’, who was killed in a rocket attack in 2017, Arsen Pavlov, aka ‘Motorola’, who was blown up in an elevator in 2016, and Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the first head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who was killed in a restaurant bombing in 2018.
Ukrainian intelligence insiders also reportedly told the outlet that the SBU’s fifth directorate currently plays a “central role” in operations against Russia, and that it has carried out attacks such as bombing the Crimean Bridge.
According to the Economist, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is “understood to authorize the most controversial operations,” while other decisions are often delegated.
Since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out in February last year, Kiev’s security services are believed to have been responsible for several high-profile killings of Russian journalists and public officials. These include the August 2022 car bomb assassination of Darya Dugina – the daughter of Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin – and the killing of military blogger Maxim Fomin (also known as Vladlen Tatarsky) in a bomb attack in St. Petersburg in April of this year.
Several of the Ukrainian insiders interviewed by the Economist admitted that they were disturbed by the targeting of “mid-level” targets. “It makes me uncomfortable,” one former SBU fifth-directorate officer said, claiming that some killings were designed to “impress the president rather than bring victory any closer.” The former spy also admitted concerns that Kiev’s assassination campaign appears to be “driven by impulse rather than logic,” the outlet said.
Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukraine of adopting terrorist tactics, and has criticized its Western backers for allegedly turning a blind eye to its activities.
The major German political parties will never investigate the pandemic response, because they are all complicit in it. Across the entire political landscape of the Federal Republic, the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland stands alone in its critical stance towards lockdowns and mass vaccination, and only in the state parliament of Brandenburg do they have sufficient seats to gather an investigatory committee on the transgressions of the Corona era. On Friday, 1 September, the AfD-convened Brandenburg Corona Committee summoned Robert Koch-Institut Chief Lothar Wieler (the German counterpart to Anthony Fauci) and Brigitte Keller-Stanislawski, head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Safety and Diagnostics at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. They were questioned for six hours on the Covid vaccines.
Journalists who eagerly reported Wieler’s every utterance during the Covid pandemic almost totally ignored his committee testimony. Among the few exceptions is Larissa Fußer, who has provided extensive reporting at Apollo News. The picture she paints is incredible: Neither the RKI, Germany’s public health authority, nor the PEI, our pharmaceuticals regulator, have taken even the most basic steps to evaluate the frequency or nature of vaccine injuries, or even the effectiveness of the vaccines in general. Technical problems, staff shortages, and the sheer extent of the data, has prevented them from fulfilling their most basic duties.
Keller-Stanislawski … reported her institute was massively overwhelmed, causing substantial delays in the evaluation of vaccine side effects that persist until this day. For example, she said, data from the “SafeVac” app released by PEI in December 2020 has yet to be analysed. The app was developed by PEI to allow easy reporting of adverse events. … They have received so many reports that they overwhelmed the technical infrastructure supporting the app. Data from 700,000 participants remain unprocessed …
Additionally, PEI staff were dramatically overworked. “There were people who only dealt with deaths and people who only dealt with myocarditis,” Keller-Stanislawski said. “We had much more work than before, all because of this vaccine. We had to get help from other departments because we didn’t have enough people to handle the adverse events.”
The PEI didn’t start evaluating adverse vaccination events yesterday. They’ve been doing this for many years, and yet somehow the world’s most safe and effective vaccine yielded so many adverse event reports that they literally broke their computers and made their routine safety evaluations impossible.
According to Keller-Stanislawski, data from the Association of Statutory Health Insurance and from insurance companies also remain to be evaluated. Although the RKI has developed a program that can process the insurance data, it requires further adjustments, which have yet to be carried out. The insurance data include, for example, doctors’ diagnoses in connection with Covid vaccination that could shed light on vaccine side effects. In other words … the PEI, whose task it is to investigate the safety of Covid vaccines, has published all their reviews on adverse events so far only on the basis of self-initiated reports from physicians and affected patients.
These reports are extremely laborious to prepare and physicians receive no remuneration for time spent writing them. The prevailing ethos among many doctors well through 2021 that the vaccines were “side-effect free” will also have disinclined many physicians even to think of associating health problems with the vaccines in the first place.
Also too, the RKI have never bothered to complete their own study of vaccine effectiveness:
The questioning of … Lothar Wieler … revealed, among other things, that the RKI has not proven on the basis of their own studies the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine. According to Wieler, such a study has been conducted, but it is still being evaluated. … Only shortly before, Wieler had told the committee that monitoring the effectiveness of vaccination was among the central tasks of the RKI.
So, it’s just the core role of the RKI, no big deal that they’ve never gotten around to it.
And then there is this insane tidbit:
The circumstances under which the Committee’s questioning took place were striking. For example, Lothar Wieler was accompanied by an employee of the Federal Ministry of Health, a certain Heiko Rottmann-Großner …. He testified that his task was to ensure that Wieler was complying with his leave to testify. As a civil servant, Wieler requires authorisation to provide information on matters that are subject to official secrecy. The authorisation regulates in detail the topics on which a witness in the civil service may not provide information.
According to media reports, Wieler’s authorisation was multiple pages long, while that of PEI bureaucrat [Keller-Stanislawski] was only one page. … [Rottmann-Großner] repeatedly gave hand signals to Wieler during the questioning, and occasionally he also passed notes to him. Committee members complained of this practice, and ultimately compelled [Rottmann-Großner] to sit two chairs further away from Wieler.
So Wieler came to testify before the Committee not only with extensive gag orders from the Karl Lauterbach’s Health Ministry, but with a special babysitter. Rottmann-Großner is not just anybody. He’s the former head of the “Health Security” subdivision of the Health Ministry; from Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo’s 2021 book Ausbruch, we know that he was an eager and early advocate for lockdowns and other heavy restrictions, demanding a nationwide “shut-down” as early as 24 February, the very day the WHO endorsed Chinese mass containment.
It is hard for me to put into words, what a scandal this is. The Federal Republic forced literally millions of Germans to receive not just one, not just two, but at least three novel Covid jabs against a virus that posed genuine risk to very few of them. In many cases the state threatened unemployment for noncompliance, shut the unvaccinated out of public life for months, and even tried to mandate vaccination via the Bundestag. Despite these grave violations of personal autonomy and bodily integrity, the bureaucrats who supported these crimes and justified them with relentless lies about virological doom now plead that their offices simply don’t have the time to establish how safe or how effective the jabs they continue to promote actually were. It’s a lot of work bro, they’re understaffed you know, there’s so much data.
To those of us well-versed in the biology and emerging safety data relating to the injections referred to as “covid vaccines”, what is playing out before us is like a slow-motion motorway pile-up: we can see it unfolding, causing immense harm, have no idea when it will stop, and feel powerless to do much about it.
At present, it is unknown for how long this ghastly experiment will continue and how much further harm will be caused.
However, unfortunately there are reasons to believe the following may well be the case:
It will take much longer for the harms caused to be acknowledged by the “establishment” and so the injections will continue to be administered for some time yet – albeit to smaller and smaller groups as time progresses, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different locations.
Even if the injections were to stop now, it is unknown how much the harms caused thus far have actually come to light, and how much may manifest over the ensuing years or even decades.
One category of reasons for the above is essentially political. We are referring here to the complete failure on the part of those we previously relied upon to ensure pharmaceutical interventions are safe. The reasons for this are willful blindness on the part of our regulatory authorities, combined with the by now rather obvious capture of these institutions by two different interested parties:
Politicians who will apparently stoop to anything, including installing transnational coordinated censorship regimes, to keep their monumental errors hidden; and
Big Pharma, desperate to ensure that their bonanza continues as long as possible.
But as well as the above there are some inherent biological reasons which may hinder and delay the ending of this unprecedented catastrophe.
For a variety of reasons which are listed below, many uncertainties remain concerning the biological action of repeated doses of the mRNA products. However, what is known suggests that many of the harms they cause are mediated by inflammatory and autoimmune processes induced (potentially) throughout the body.
To recap the principal mode of action, the lipid nanoparticles carry mRNA into some of the recipient’s cells. These cells express spike protein – which is foreign to the body. The body’s immune system creates antibodies to that protein, as well as attacking and destroying the cells which express the protein.
In contrast to the original claims made – that the product would be broken down in the deltoid (shoulder) muscle with little or no distribution throughout the body, it turns out that the product DOES become widely distributed – potentially to every organ system. Of course, this should not have been surprising, since the whole point of the lipid in the lipid nanoparticles is to make them able to cross membranes and become distributed, to help with their original role as conveyors of targeted drugs to cancerous cells.
Moreover:
The amount of spike protein produced is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, as is the duration over which it is produced. High levels of spike antibodies have been found many months after injection, suggesting continued creation of the protein.
The spike protein produced has inbuilt differences compared to the natural version – the replacement of uridine by pseudouridine – designed to ensure the mRNA is less degradable. Other changes (eg codon optimisation) may well alter the folding characteristics of the protein produced – with unknown consequences.
It is thought that the spike protein my translocate to the nuclei of cells… cancer
The repeated creation of spike from multiple injections may have deleterious effects, both on the ability to fight similar viruses (so-called “tolerance” created through changing the type of antibody created) through to immune exhaustion (reducing the body’s ability to fight other pathogens or cancers)
The LNPs themselves (notwithstanding their “payload”) may well be pro-inflammatory in themselves…
The significance of above-tolerance levels of DNA contamination left-over from the bacterial plasmids used in the high-volume manufacturing process are as yet unknown.
Much of the harm observed appears to be inflammatory or auto-immune in nature. Both these processes are usually chronic, not acute problems. It is perfectly possible that once started, they continue for months or even years. Notably, chronic inflammation is thought to have a central role in many of the chronic pathologies increasingly suffered by Westerners over the past few decades.
Hence the tail of visible harm could manifest over a long timeframe. Moreover, because chronic inflammatory and autoimmune processes, by their nature, build slowly over time, the individual is likely to become habituated to ill effects, until a critical event occurs after some longer period.
A good example of this is with coronary artery disease. It is thought that inflammation is an important part of the pathophysiology in which a “plaque” builds up in the arterial wall. This may be asymptomatic until it ruptures causing a total blockage resulting in a “heart attack”. If the injections are accelerating this inflammatory process, the course of the pathological process may appear identical to that previously seen in many people, although it has been brought on and accelerated beyond what that person would otherwise have experienced; however, because it is within the range of possible or even probable illnesses observed, it gets dismissed as “one of those things”.
Cigarette manufacturers used to deny their products caused lung cancer by pointing out non-smokers who suffered the same fate. It was, in fact, only by rigorous epidemiological analysis that the link could be unequivocally proven. For the covid injections, it is deeply concerning that authorities seem to be doing everything possible to hinder access to the data which would permit such analyses to be performed.
Another reason why harms may be difficult to identify is that in some cases the pathological processes may be merely reducing physiological reserve, something which can go unnoticed for years or decades. Most of the body’s systems have significant inbuilt redundancy, which is why a kidney, or a significant part of the liver, can be lost while still maintaining good physiological and biochemical control. But if someone loses a kidney, they are more likely to suffer renal failure as they get older and the efficiency of their kidneys declines, and the available reserve falls away. Likewise, if part of the heart is damaged when young (eg through myocarditis), they may well make a full recovery in the short term in the sense of being physiologically normal, but be more vulnerable to suffering from heart failure (where the heart can’t pump blood around the body sufficiently) after losing some more heart muscle tissue after – say – a heart attack in middle age.
Finally, it should be noted that because of the wide distribution throughout the body (something rather obvious given the wide range of reports in the various adverse event databases), the harms appear to be manifesting in an extremely wide variety of symptoms and disorders. These will be problematic to diagnose, requiring lengthy and complex investigation, with multiple pathologies being possible. Such profiles of types of harms have not generally been observed with pharmaceutical products before; in most cases, the adverse effects are more limited in scope, and more closely temporally related to dosing (though there are some exceptions).
In conclusion
It is not possible to say whether we are at the beginning, or near the end of, the harms caused by these agents.
A combination of what may be termed “political” reasons, together with the inherent biological characteristics of the mRNA “vaccines”, all mitigate against the injections being identified and accepted anytime soon as being the causative agent of significant and sustained harms being experienced by an unacceptably large number of people.
Moreover, it remains likely that they will continue to be administered for some time yet – at least to certain groups in certain places – prolonging and exacerbating the harms already caused.
When American President Ronald Reagan entered office, he set a goal of re-energizing the American empire that had lost momentum after its embarrassing defeat in Vietnam. Invading the tiny island nation of Grenada would be an easy military victory to display American imperial power. The CIA instigated violence in Grenada and blamed communists, while asserting the Soviets were building a military base on the island. A propaganda campaign began and American military exercises were held to prepare for this invasion.
“John Stockwell interview”; Alternative Views; PBS; • Video
“The Story Behind Some of History’s Greatest Military Blunders – Politics by Other Means”; Timeline World History Documentaries; Great Military Blunders S1 E3; April 22, 2017; • The Story Behind Some Of History’s Gr…
Britain sparked an international outcry earlier this year when officials revealed that the Challenger 2 tanks sent to Ukraine would be equipped with depleted uranium (DU) shells. The US is now expected to follow suit with DU rounds for Ukraine’s Abrams. A Russian military observer explains why the toxic arms won’t change the situation at the front.
A White House National Security Council spokesperson told Sputnik Sunday that they could not confirm reports indicating that Washington is preparing to send armor-piercing DU munitions to Ukraine as part of a new arms package to be announced this week.
The DU munitions are expected to accompany the Abrams main battle tanks the US first agreed to give Kiev back in January to coax its European allies into sending hundreds of their own tanks, with the first batch of Abrams expected to arrive by mid-September, well over three months into Ukraine’s stalled counteroffensive.
Previous reporting on the Ukrainian-bound Abrams indicated that the tanks wouldn’t be fitted with depleted uranium components in their composite armor. However, in June, it became clear that they would likely be armed with DU penetrator rounds, with anonymous officials saying at the time that they saw no ‘serious obstacles’ to deliveries, notwithstanding long-standing international concerns about DU shells’ impact on human health and the environment.
Tank, artillery and air-launched DU munitions have left a horrifying record of destruction and illness in their wake in the countries where they have been deployed, including Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. Russia and Ukraine, the US, the UK, India, Pakistan, France, China, and a number of Western allies in the Middle East and Asia, are known to possess the controversial weapons, but the US and Britain are the only two countries to date confirmed to have ever used them.
Using depleted uranium as a weapon constitutes a crude form of the ‘recycling’ of spent nuclear fuel, and first began to be experimented with by the United States in the 1970s to pierce increasingly advanced Warsaw Pact armor. DU shells have been touted as a ‘budget’ variant of tungsten ore-based penetrator projectiles, having a similar density, but costing less to produce and even more powerful.
The shells’ radioactive properties have a direct impact on their penetrative ability. When fired at enemy armor, DU-tipped rounds generate an immense amount of heat, literally sloughing off portions of the projectile as it rams into its target to keep the shell’s tip sharp and prevent mushrooming. This helps the rounds grind into and through armor almost like a hot knife through butter, penetrating enemy vehicles and killing any unfortunate souls who happen to be inside.
But their destructive impact doesn’t end there. Because they are radioactive, the weapons have a tendency to poison their surrounding environment, affecting everyone from the troops inside the tanks firing the shells, to enemy combatants, and local civilians.
Iraq and republics of the former Yugoslavia are the countries most heavily affected by DU contamination to date, with cancer rates in Iraq jumping from 40 cases per 100,000 people in 1991 to 800 per 100,000 in 1995, to a whopping 1,600 per 100,000 by 2025 after the US and Britain deployed up to 2,300 tons of DU in the country.
In Yugoslavia, at least 15 tons of DU were used during the bombings of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro in the mid-late 1990s, with Serbia subsequently suffering from one of the highest cancer rates in Europe – two-and-a-half times the European average, plus an alarming rise in infertility, a variety of autoimmune diseases and mental disorders.
Last month, Serbian Health Minister Danica Grujicic appealed to Ukrainian decision makers and the population at large urging them not to allow DU shells to be used on their soil, saying her country’s experience should serve as ample warning of the weapons’ devastating long-term consequences. “Believe me, what’s happening in Ukraine will affect the health of all European countries,” Grujicic told Sputnik.
Ukrainians and Europeans first got a taste of what the Serbian health minister was talking about in the spring, when a massive arms depot outside the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi thought to include DU munitions for Ukraine’s Challenger 2s went up in smoke, resulting in a massive spike in levels of gamma radiation levels in neighboring Poland.
Russian officials have also warned of DU weapons’ dangers. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted late last month that the use of the weapons would turn portions of Ukraine into an “uninhabitable” wasteland, with “radioactive contamination of the soil… already happening” and being recorded.
Ukrainian and most Western media have been more upbeat, however, insisting that the DU would give the nation’s armed forces the shot in the arm they need to bolster its flagging counteroffensive –which to date has seen immense losses in manpower and equipment, but very little to show in terms of gained ground.
Questionable Tactical Benefits Accompanied by Horrendous Costs
“The main advantage of DU munitions is their higher penetration level,” Boris Rozhin, a military expert with the Center for Military-Political Journalism think tank, told Sputnik.
“The proponents of DU munitions’ use, in the case of deliveries to Ukraine… came to the conclusion that the Ukrainian military will be able to fight Russian armor more effectively – that is, to increase the chances of defeating Russian tanks using British and American tanks. This is positioned as the main advantage of these kinds of shells,” he said.
The obvious disadvantage, the observer added, relates to the threat of radioactively contaminating wide swathes of the surrounding environment. DU rounds “were used in wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, on the territory of Iraq. In those cases, there is proven harm to health after the use of such projectiles, with the number of people suffering from the use of these shells measured in the hundreds of thousands. They have suffered radiation-related damage to their tissues and organs, leading to a range of diseases and early mortality.”
Unfortunately, Rozhin said, the United States military does not formally recognize the validity of DU-related risks, positioning it as “relatively harmless” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
So far, the observer pointed out, the DU-equipped Challenger 2 tanks have not been spotted on the battlefield. Their successful use against the armor of Russian tanks like the T-72B3 or T-90 would require the tanks to approach quite close, to within 3,000 meters. This is something Ukrainian forces have found difficult to do amid Russia’s overwhelming air and artillery superiority, which has often enabled Russian forces to target Ukrainian armor at ranges of tens of kilometers away, long before it can approach close enough to return fire.
If they approach close enough, “then they could do a great deal of harm. But since there are very few such cases, it will not affect the current state of affairs or course of the special military operation,” Rozhin summed up.
Once again, Kiev makes clear its intention to continue carrying out terrorist attacks on the undisputed territory of the Russian Federation. In a recent interview, the head of Ukrainian intelligence stated that the conflict should be “extended” to “Russian territory”, thus showing that neo-Nazi forces plan to continue with incursions into Russia’s demilitarized zone, unnecessarily endangering the lives of innocent civilians.
The words were spoken by Kirill Budanov, head of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR). During an interview with Ukrainian TV anchor Natalya Moseichuk, he stated that hostilities need to be extended to deep inside Russian territory, in addition to countries and regions where Russia “has influence”.
“The war must be extended to other territory – which for us is clearly Russia – and other areas where they have influence (…) The wider the operations are, the better”, he said.
For Budanov, the deepening of territorial incursions against Russia is an efficient strategy from the military point of view, since it would supposedly allow “paralyzing” Moscow’s forces, giving Kiev’s troops an advantage. In other words, in the face of heavy losses, Ukraine wants to gain time to reorganize itself and think about new combat tactics – and plans to do this by keeping the Russians busy trying to neutralize deep attacks.
It is also curious that Budanov mentions the possibility of attacks against areas where Russia “has influence”. In practice, he is admitting that Kiev plans to attack Russia’s allies, internationalizing the conflict. In this regard, it is necessary to remember that until now several sabotage operations have already been carried out by the Ukrainians against the territory of Belarus. Considering Budanov’s words, it is expected that new maneuvers of this type will happen in the near future.
A few days before Budanov’s interview, another Ukrainian intelligence officer had already made similar statements. In an interview to the New York Times on August 25, Andrey Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service, stated that “Russian elites and ordinary Russians now understand that war is not somewhere far away on the territory of Ukraine, which they hate”, adding that the “war is also in Moscow, it’s already on their territory.”
Commenting on Yusov’s words at the time, New York Times journalists stated that Kiev’s drone attacks against Russia have been working as a “morale booster”. They also said that, despite previous American disapproval of this type of maneuver, now “US officials conceded that attempted Ukrainian strikes had so far been calibrated, and they had not provoked any drastic escalation by Moscow.”
In fact, both Budanov’s and Yusov’s words directly contradict the statement by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky himself, who on August 27th showed a lack of interest in carrying out in-depth attacks, stating that such operations risk Kiev being “left alone“. Zelensky apparently thinks the attacks create an uncomfortable situation for the West, which, despite maintaining a proxy war, tries to avoid a direct conflict with Moscow.
So, once again Ukrainian internal disagreements become clear. Officials claim different things and expose strategies for the conflict that contradict each other. In practice, there are only two possibilities in this scenario: either Zelensky is acting propagandistically, and privately he authorizes attacks in depth, while publicly denying them. Or, on the other hand, the regime’s officials are acting in a totally decentralized way, with military and intelligence agents carrying out attacks without prior authorization from Zelensky.
Both scenarios seem plausible, but to analyze the case properly it is necessary to consider what the West says on the topic, as the Ukrainian state is not sovereign and acts only as a proxy for NATO. There have been several US pronouncements so far disallowing attacks on undisputed Russian territory, but according to the New York Times, the current trend among US officials is to recognize drone incursions as “calibrated” and with low risk of escalation.
So, it is possible that US officials coordinating Ukrainian military operations on the battlefield are authorizing these drone strikes, as well as other forms of territorial invasion of Russia, without any communication to Zelensky. With so much evidence that the Ukrainian president is now isolated, without Western support and on the verge of being replaced, his exclusion from the military decision-making process seems likely.
However, these attacks will not bring any military advantage to Kiev. Escalation possibilities exist and Moscow will certainly react incisively if it perceives enemy incursions as a significant threat. This has not happened so far because the Russian forces have been efficient in neutralizing or reducing the damage of most attacks, but, having military control of the conflict, the Russians could assume a more escalatory attitude at any time. If it is necessary to increase the frequency and intensity of attacks on Ukraine to prevent the conflict zone from expanding into its undisputed territory, Moscow will certainly do so.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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• The CIA in Angola 
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