The US and Britain expended over 2,000 tons of depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. Now, London plans to hand DU shells to Ukraine. British and US officials insist the weapons are safe, but what does the evidence say? Sputnik investigates.
The political fallout over the United Kingdom’s decision to send DU anti-tank shells to Kiev for use along with its Challenger 2 tanks continues to spread. On Saturday, President Putin said he didn’t buy Britain’s assurances that the munitions wouldn’t cause any health effects, and that taking into account the toxic radioactive dust generated by the shells, they “of course amount to a weapon of the most dangerous kind.”
Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCBD) Troops, echoed the president’s concerns, predicting that the weapons’ use would “cause irreparable harm” to the health of soldiers and the civilian population alike, with DU compounds expected to remain in the soil and affect people, animals and the environment for many years to come.
Russia’s concerns are not unjustified. Throughout the past year, Russian intelligence and the RCBD Troops issued report after worrying report regarding Kiev’s ambitions to build nuclear weapons, scenarios involving false flags using radioactive dirty bombs, and a long list of evidence of dangerous US and European-funded and coordinated experiments with biological weapons at Ukraine-based biolabs.
But depleted uranium poses a special kind of danger, due both to its availability and record of use.
Discovered during the Cold War by US and British scientists as an effective but controversial armor-piercing weapon, DU tank and artillery shells and air-dropped bombs are stuffed with the uranium byproducts left over from the production of nuclear energy.
The militaries of NATO, the USSR, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and South Africa stockpiled hundreds of thousands of tons of DU materials, but the WWIII scenario they were training for never became a reality.
But having acquired the weapons, the US and its NATO allies quickly found places to use them, overlooking all potential international legal and moral barriers. DU shells and bombs were deployed during the Gulf War in 1991, in the bombardment of Bosnia and the rump state of Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2001-2021 occupation of Afghanistan, the dirty war against Syria, and, allegedly, the 2011 NATO air campaign in Libya.
Iraq and the former Yugoslavia were hit the hardest, with upwards of 2,300 tons of DU used in the Middle Eastern country in 1991 and 2003-2005, and as much as 30 tons strewn across the Balkans between the mid-to-late 1990s. Almost every country in which DU has been used has reported a surge in deadly ailments, including cancers, strokes, and birth defects. In Iraq, cancer rates in DU-affected areas jumped from 40 cases per 100,000 in 1991 to 800 per 100,000 in 1995, and 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005. Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovar Albanians, Montenegrins and other peoples of the former Yugoslavia suffered a similar fate, with Serbia today facing some of the highest cancer rates in Europe, with many attributing the spike in illness to NATO’s DU deployment two-and-a-half decades ago.
‘Anecdotal Evidence’ Claiming Real Lives
The US and UK governments have bent over backwards to avoid admitting that depleted uranium is the cause of the epidemic of cancers facing Iraqis, Serbs and others, suggesting evidence regarding their effects is “anecdotal” and “circumstantial.”
In 2021, British and US researchers released a much-cited study which concluded that low-level exposure to pesticides and sarin nerve gas, not depleted uranium, were the “most likely” causes of Gulf War Syndrome – the chronic disorder faced by about hundreds of thousands of US vets who took part in the 1991 Gulf War, and who now face a heightened incidence of cancers, respiratory and neurological illnesses, and other diseases.
“The British Army has used depleted uranium in its armor piercing shells for decades,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a statement last week meant to “debunk” Moscow’s concerns. “Russia knows this, but is deliberately trying to disinform. Independent research by scientists from groups such as the Royal Society has assessed that any impact to personal health and the environment from the use of depleted uranium munitions is likely to be low.”
But independent academics and researchers who have studied the weapons’ use and impact tell a very different story, as do those who know victims of depleted uranium poisoning, including Iraqi and Balkan civilians, but also NATO troops tasked with handling and deploying the toxic weapons.
“[Coalition forces] used depleted uranium shells in Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf, Baqubah and Fallujah; they were extensively used in Fallujah in 2004, and today, about 15 percent of the children born in this city suffer from congenital deformities, which is a very high rate. About 5 percent die from these deformities,” Dr. Souad Naji Al-Azzawi, a prolific Iraqi researcher specializing in hazardous waste contamination, told Sputnik in an interview.
“They completely destroyed Fallujah with these and other weapons,” the academic said, noting that radioactive contaminants spread by DU munitions have polluted the entire region’s food supply.
Al-Azzawi said there are roughly 5,000 DU-contaminated tanks and other armored vehicles destroyed by the coalition in the 1991 war and after the 2003 invasion spread across nearly two dozen large tank grave yards around Basra. “Whenever a sandstorm blows through the area, an additional dose of radiation moves from these sites towards the civilian population,” she noted.
Srjan Aleksic, a Serbian lawyer who represents victims of the 1999 NATO bombings, says DU has killed and sickened many of his relatives and clients.
“My mother died from depleted uranium, as did many of my relatives from the village of Bushtranje. NATO officials themselves admitted that they bombed Plackovica Mountain, overlooking the city of Vranje, and four villages near the border with Macedonia. There were large numbers of troops and equipment near Vranje, and NATO bombed these villages with depleted uranium every day,” Aleksic recalled in an interview.
“In 2005 alone, an area of about two square kilometers was cleared of depleted uranium. Our army did that. They put up a wire fence and wrote ‘Hazard to Life: Do Not Approach’. But nobody knew about that until 2005,” the lawyer added.
Aleksic hopes to take a case against NATO to Belgrade’s Higher Court later this year, representing a Serbian officer who filed to sue the alliance in early 2021, but subsequently died, with a health checkup finding levels of uranium contaminants in his body to be off the charts. NATO claims immunity from prosecution, but the attorney hopes to win compensation for the victim’s family anyway, saying the court could reach a verdict without the alliance’s participation.
“There is no immunity from criminal responsibility, especially when it comes to responsibility to civilians. My mother got sick, my relatives got sick, my clients got sick. They had nothing to do with the war; I am not getting into politics. I’m just talking about the consequences,” Aleksic stressed.
The lawyer explained that his efforts to defend victims of the 1999 bombings got started after working with Angelo Fiore Tartaglia, a Rome-based attorney who has spent some 20 years of his life representing Italian soldiers injured by DU, and their families.
“He has been very successful. Many Italian soldiers have cancer, especially those who were in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 when NATO bombed it with depleted uranium, as well as Kosovo and Metohija. To date, he has obtained 330 [favorable] final judgements – 400 Italian soldiers have died from the effects of cancer – and he has proven a causal link between depleted uranium and their adverse health effects,” Aleksic said.
Domenico Leggiero is a retired Italian military pilot and weapons inspector who saw firsthand how many of his colleagues began to “fall ill with cancers, just like falling leaves,” after service in the former Yugoslavia. Leggiero now heads Osservatorio Militaire, an Italian military watchdog that seeks to shed light on the consequences of DU use on Italian troops.
“We couldn’t figure out where the cancers were coming from until we and our medics started taking biopsy samples from troops that had gotten sick, or even died. So we would take the primary biopsy of tumors and look at them not as medics, but as physicists, and realized that within these biopsy samples, there were materials that shouldn’t have been there,” Leggiero told Sputnik.
“We’re talking cadmium, we’re talking mineral substances, heavy metals. Furthermore, these heavy metals all had a well-defined shape and size – a very small size – 10-100 times smaller than PM-10 [particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less, ed.]. They basically had a spherical shape,” the soldier explained.
In research, Leggiero and his colleagues discovered that these particles were so minute and numerous that they were could disburse in the air over long periods of time, get inhaled by exposed civilians and military personnel, and enter the food chain after being deposited on crops.
The veteran said the Italian military’s commanders “knew” about the health risks associated with DU munitions since they were provided with this information by the Pentagon, but ordinary soldiers “were not warned.”
“I am in possession of all possible and imaginable documentation, including the rules on how to treat material contaminated with uranium. These rules were established at the level of the general staff; they were never issued among the troops, and therefore we essentially had a massacre,” Leggiero said.
‘Depleted Uranium Makes No Distinction Between Nationalities’
Dr. Hans-Christof von Sponeck, a former UN assistant secretary-general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq who resigned in 2000 in protest against the UN’s sanctions regime, which he said constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions, has no doubt in his mind about the consequences of the US and Britain’s use of DU on Iraqi civilians.
“I will not pronounce on the question of whether the use of depleted uranium is legal or illegal – this debate is still taking place elsewhere. What I can state without hesitation is that I have seen the victims of depleted uranium munitions used by the US military in southern Iraq. On several occasions, I visited the Mother and Child Hospital in Basra in 1999 and saw young mothers with their horrifically deformed babies, something that had not existed before the 1991 war,” Sponeck told Sputnik.
“Let me also add that depleted uranium does not make a distinction between different nationalities. British and American soldiers deployed to southern Iraq and their families, also became the victims of depleted uranium, as court cases in the UK and the US confirm…Should depleted uranium munitions be used in Ukraine, it would mean that people in the area, soldiers and civilians alike, would be victimized even though the dangers of such munitions are well known in 2023,” the veteran German diplomat stressed.
What Makes DU Charges Difficult to Pursue?
“Based on what we know, depleted uranium will be bad for health and likely cause cancer. However, linking depleted uranium exposure to its effects using epidemiology is extremely difficult,” says Dr. Keith Baverstock, a veteran University of Eastern Finland biologist and former head of the Radiation Protection Program at the World Health Organization’s European office.
For one thing, Baverstock said, “exposure is very local to where a depleted uranium munition impacts but the depleted uranium, particularly in arid conditions, persists on the surface of the ground, so defining an exposed population is also difficult.” On top of that, the security situation in some affected countries, particularly Iraq, makes meaningful epidemiological research next to impossible, according to the scientist.
“However, we have information from animal and laboratory studies that tell us that DNA will be damaged if inhaled depleted uranium dust crosses the blood/air barrier in the lung (it can become systemic), and thus the normal functioning of cells, including germ cells, could be impaired and thus health effects, including cancer and birth defects, are likely risks in persons exposed to depleted uranium dust via inhalation,” the academic said.
“As a public health scientist, I regard these weapons as illegal, as do some EU countries,” Baverstock added.
Cancer Rates Double Those of Hiroshima
Chris Busby is a physical chemist, internal ionizing radiation expert and former senior researcher for a 2000s UK Ministry of Defense study examining the effects of DU weapons on veterans of the First Gulf War.
In an extensive, wide-ranging and highly illuminating interview with Sputnik, Dr. Busby explained how he and a group of British and Iraqi colleagues carried out extensive, first-hand, on-the-ground research into oncological diseases and child mortality in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. Research led them to discover that cancer rates in Fallujah – specifically those associated with radiation, like leukemia and lymphoma, were higher than those in Hiroshima, the Japanese city hit with a US atomic bomb in 1945, and not just by a little, but by a factor of two or even more, depending on the cancer type.
“We found out the high level of infant mortality within the first year of life and the cause of these deaths were congenital malformations. We also [found a] skewed birth sex ratio, which is another sign of genetic damage associated with radiation exposure. We put all of these results together and concluded that there had been some very large genetic damage event which occurred around the time of the Fallujah [campaign],” the academic said.
Smoking Gun
Busby recalled how at the time, the Americans denied using DU munitions, prompting him and his colleagues to examine the hair of Iraqi women whose children suffered birth defects. That’s when they found what looks like smoking gun evidence of a direct correlation between the genetic mutations and DU use.
“There’s a method called ICP-MS, Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry, in which you can take a hair sample and you can dissolve it in acid, and then you can measure the atoms inside the hair sample and see what the concentration of all these different elements are. So we looked at 52 elements in the hair of 20 mothers of children with congenital malformations, and we found that there was an anomalously high level of uranium. The only anomaly we found associated with an element which can cause congenital malformations was uranium. And we found that. Arab women have very long hair. We know the rate at which hair grows, so we cut the hair into little slices and measured the uranium in each of the slices going back to the first bit. So we [could] get a graph of the uranium in the hair going right the way back to about 2005. And what we found is that the uranium went up, when we went back in time. So clearly there was an increase in uranium round about the time just after Fallujah battle, which then reduced as time went on, obviously because it got excreted from the system. So we had more or less proof, that uranium was the cause of all of these congenital malformations, genetic damage, sex ratio and extraordinary high level of cancer,” the scientist said.
Busby says that one of the factors making DU so deadly is its ability to bind strongly to DNA – a factor the scientific community has known about since the 1950s. As uranium burns, it produces microscopic volatile particles which behave like a gas and can contaminate wide swathes of territory, not only the environment surrounding battlefields, but neighboring countries or even distant regions. The academic pointed out, for example, that filters in the UK looking out for uranium picked up contamination from Iraq in 2003.
Another issue, which Dr. Busby said he discovered mostly independently, and which he presented to the MoD’s Depleted Uranium Oversight Board in 2004, is uranium’s very high atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom), which he said turns it into “a sort of amplifier for normal radiation.”
“We all live in an environment where we get gamma rays that come through our body and go out… If you’ve got uranium inside you, then it intercepts this [radiation] because of its high atomic number and all its electrons. In my opinion, and I’ve written quite a lot about this, this is the reason why uranium is very dangerous. First of all, it binds to DNA. Secondly, it causes these photo electrons to be omitted into the DNA. And all studies that have been done of people exposed to uranium showed massive chromosome damage. So when they look to see the chromosomes in their cells, in the peripheral blood cells, they find massive amounts of chromosome damage that leads to genetic effects – cancer, birth defects and so forth. So that’s the reason why uranium is so dangerous,” the academic emphasized.
‘There’s Nothing to Do Except Wait for Them to Die’
Busby noted that once uranium contaminant particles enter the body, they don’t go away. Instead, they sit inside the victim, “shooting off little cannonballs all the time, close into the cells,” into the DNA, until a tumor is formed.
Recalling visits to Iraqi hospitals and conversations with local doctors treating people suffering from the DU usage after the First Gulf War, the scientist recalled how doctors told him that there was nothing they could do to combat the disease thanks to the tough sanctions regime against Iraq.
Busby emphasized that even with access to the right medicines and medical care, “to be honest, there’s not much you can do” for those affected.
“If you’ve got the sorts of pictures that we see and that I have, of the children with congenital malformations, there’s nothing you can do except throw your hands up and wait for them to die. I talked to a number of families while I was in the hospitals and looking at the poor children with leukemia lying there in beds. They were going to die, that’s it. There’s nothing you can do. And the contamination of the area is a public health nightmare, because the doctors can’t do anything,” the academic said.
Putin ‘Absolutely Right’ to Be Concerned
Saying that he’s familiar with President Putin’s remarks on the dangers posed by the potential use of DU weapons in Ukraine, Busby said the Russian leader was “absolutely right” to be upset and concerned.
“President Putin has accurately identified this as a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon of indiscriminate effect. The British and the Americans continue to cling to their crazy theory that these radioactive substances which bind to DNA are effectively harmless and have no genetic or indiscriminate effects on populations. In this case, I just have to say that the British are wrong, that this substance is contaminating Europe and it will cause all of the effects that it caused in Iraq that I have shown. It will cause all those effects in Germany, and Luxembourg, and France, and Sweden, and the Baltic States and long list of countries which stand between Ukraine and the United Kingdom,” the observer stressed.
The problem today, according to Dr. Busby, is that the military planners in Washington and London see DU as a “magic” anti-tank weapon. “It’s inconceivable that the military would allow anyone to stop them using [DU] in a real war where you want to win, and they don’t really care about the people that die as a result of all of this, the collateral damage…the cancers downwind, the congenital malformations, the weeping parents and all the rest of it,” the scientist summed up.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida paid a surprise visit to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Moscow. Both visits came as the announcement of future DU ammo supplies to Ukraine hit the headlines.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been condemned by the opposition for staying tight-lipped on the UK’s announced delivery of depleted uranium ammunition to the Kiev regime, according to media reports.
Taro Yamamoto, leader of the opposition party Reiwa Shinsengumi, is said to have raised the issue at a budget committee meeting in the Japanese parliament’s upper house.
“Mr Prime Minister, do you intend to encourage the UK not to send such shells?” the politician is cited as asking Kishida.
The head of the Japanese government ostensibly dodged giving a direct answer, saying something to the effect that, “despite studies on the negative effects on human health, no concrete results have been obtained”. However, Yamamoto would not let up, pressing further:
“Actually, such munitions could already be classified as nuclear weapons, … and it was found that there is a risk of cancer … Mr. Prime Minister, during your meeting with Zelensky, did you ask him not to use ammunition with depleted uranium?”
Kishida is said to have responded by saying that, “As for depleted uranium weapons, I didn’t say anything specific about it in my meeting with Zelensky.”
The opposition leader then slammed this response as sending a “bad message,” and added, as a parting “broadside”, that the Prime Minister himself was “from Hiroshima.”
The US dropped two atomic bombs – plutonium Fat Man and gun-type uranium Little Boy – on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki hosted any key military installations whatsoever.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who will chair the Group of Seven (G7) summit scheduled for May, visited Ukraine on March 21. He met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a day after Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
Kishida’s visit was seen by analysts as tailored to demonstrate that Japan is “the West’s reliable ally”. Even though Kishida embarked on his Kiev visit to show solidarity with Ukraine, Tokyo has been contributing less economic help to Ukraine than other countries of the so-called collective West. Japan has limited itself to sending things like bulletproof vests, helmets and some humanitarian aid. Exports of arms and military equipment in Japan is regulated by the Japanese Arms Export Ban, known as the Three Principles on Arms Exports that prohibit the provision of lethal weapons to other countries.
Earlier, London announced its intent to supply depleted uranium (DU) munitions to Kiev to be used in the US-led proxy war of the collective West against Russia in Ukraine. The announcement was met with broad condemnation from Moscow. Russia warned that DU compounds that remain in the soil after its use as part of projectiles, may be dangerous to humans, animals and the environment for a lengthy amount of time.
“The use of uranium ammunition will cause irreversible harm to the health of the military and civilian population of Ukraine, but NATO is ready to supply them to Kiev,” Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian armed forces, said. He recounted that NATO unleashed about 40,000 shells containing over 15 tons of depleted uranium during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.
Of all the theatricals of the last three years, one of the most dramatic was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dice with death by Covid. Having won a landslide in the general election of December 2019, he found his fresh mandate diverted almost immediately by the deadly contagion from China. But was Johnson really blindsided, or was he aware of the coming Covid-19 regime before it spread from Wuhan? And if he knew, this leads to another sensational but serious question.
If you believe, as I do, that Covid-19 was an elaborate hoax, this burdens you with a need to explain how such a massive scam could be conducted so successfully. At what level of the powers-that-be would the truth be known, and who was running the show from the outset? Probably the vast majority of politicians, like scientists, health service managers, doctors and other clinicians simply took the novel coronavirus as fact, but leaders of prominent nations must have known more: in some cases, their contribution went beyond giving daily briefings to press and public to actively performing the pseudopandemic.
A leading character, I suggest, was Boris Johnson. His role was to get himself admitted to hospital, and to nearly die from the terrifying disease. If you deny the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there are two possible explanations for Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital in London in April 2020. First, that he succumbed to illness as a result of overwork and stress, although it would be unusual for a man of his age (he was then 55) to be knocking at death’s door with a common respiratory infection. The second is that this episode was a psy-op to escalate fear in society.
Let us recall the sociopolitical context of spring 2020. Johnson, bête-noire of the progressive intelligentsia, not least for promoting Brexit, was as much loathed as loved. The Tory government, in a knee-jerk reaction by media critics and political opponents, was accused of reckless disregard for lives. The portrayal of Johnson was of a buffoon, scientifically and morally inept for the situation. His statement about ‘herd immunity’ was lambasted, but perhaps this was all part of the play.
In the early days, the government and its scientific and medical advisers counselled calm and constraint on Covid-19, implying an overblown threat. My guess is that this was a holding phase, to present a stark contrast between the initial approach and the shocking declaration of an unprecedented mortal hazard.
A week after imposing lockdown in March 2020, Johnson tested positive for Covid-19. At that time, such diagnosis was widely regarded as extremely worrying, with a reported infection fatality rate upwards of 5 per cent, increasing with risk factors such as obesity (Johnson is no sylph). His supporters lamented his cavalier attitude, visiting hospitals without a mask and shaking hands with victims. Soon after, Johnson was admitted to hospital as ‘a precautionary measure’. He rapidly progressed to the intensive care unit (for the official narrative, see here).
Could Johnson be killed by the disease that he failed to take seriously? His haters hoped so. Piers Morgan, disgusted by the trolls, tweeted on April 52020:
If you’re not rooting for our Prime Minister tonight & willing him to make a speedy recovery, then you’re a despicable human being. He is very ill with a deadly virus & his pregnant partner has also been sick. Incredibly worrying time for them & the country. Come on Boris 👊 pic.twitter.com/hQjZtgFGUz
He survived, of course, and one week later went on television (on Easter Sunday no less) to declare that ‘the NHS saved my life, no question’.
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He claimed that hospital doctors had been preparing to announce his death. Was he lying? Johnson is still undergoing scrutiny for his account of Partygate over the gatherings he and colleagues attended Downing Street during lockdown. The man is certainly not averse to economies of truth.
Inconsistencies in the hospital story led to Marcus J Bull, founder of the lobby group Stop Lying in Politics, seeking information from the hospital and the Information Commissioner. Bull had previously tried to sue Johnson for a controversial slogan on a ‘Vote Leave’ campaign bus. The highly effective message was that Britain was sending a vast sum of money to the EU which could otherwise be spent on the NHS. Bull failed to take Johnson to court on that occasion, but now he was convinced that he had evidence that Johnson had lied about almost dying. Johnson later retracted, saying that his condition had been relatively mild, and that his doctors were erring on the side of caution. (Watch the video explaining Marcus Ball’s Deathgate accusation: Did Boris Johnson lie about nearly dying of COVID?)
Two years later, on June 6 2022, the hard-left ‘Tories eat your babies’ website Skwawkbox revisited the alleged lies by Johnson about his stay in St Thomas’ Hospital. The article covered Bull’s investigative efforts, and asserted:
This quote epitomises the abject failure of the Left (socialist or liberal) to understand what was really going on with the whole Covid-19 emergency. Locked in their political tribalism, they cannot see the wood for the trees. Skwawkbox referred to Johnson saying ‘let the bodies pile high’, as if that was cast-iron truth.
A properly critical perspective on Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital would be to ask whether he was really there (apart from a photo-shoot on admission). In my cynical view, Johnson didn’t have Covid-19 because the disease, as we’ve come to learn, is a contrivance, and it’s very likely that he must have known the real reason for this particular pantomime. This would be a crime far more malevolent than the ‘too slow to lock down’ argument being posited by the statist Left.
An obvious challenge to the alleged faux maladie is that hospital management and clinicians must have participated in the pretence. This would be anathema to anyone who still believes that the NHS is a wholly ethical operation, despite its dubious Covid-19 policies (which included unnecessary and hazardous use of ventilators, mass discharge of sick elderly patients, stopping cancer screening and surgery, and telling people not to come into hospital unless they were at death’s door). Is it beyond the realms of possibility that with such a credible and compliant (already caught up in a culture of panic) staff of doctors and nurses, some were quite prepared to believe that the PM was critically ill – or agreed (perhaps with sufficient inducement) not to question it and to provide care and treatment to a patient who wasn’t ill, and so conspire to support the lie?
I’ve heard many people say that Johnson seemed a changed man when he returned to duties in Downing Street. Could that be because he had just told the biggest and boldest lie of his life?
Baroness Goldie is an experienced Scottish politician and life peer who served as Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2005 to 2011 and as the UK’s Minister of State for Defence since 2019. She is anything but a party girl like Liz Truss who often had to swallow her indiscreet words betraying ignorance.
Certainly, Baroness Goldie understood perfectly well the implications of what she put down in a written statement at the House of Lords on March 20 in her answer to Lord Hylton’s seemingly innocuous question: “To ask His Majesty’s Government whether any of the ammunition currently being supplied to Ukraine contains depleted uranium.” (By the way, Lord Hylton is one of 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords; he is currently the longest-serving Crossbench member of the House of Lords, since 1968, and is a dynamic campaigner for peace and the interests of the vulnerable and the marginalised.)
It is a fair guess that the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace kept 10 Downing Street informed — and even more important, had prior consultations and concurrence with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin — before Baroness Goldie made the statement.
Both Wallace and Austin are military people and understand why ammunition tipped with “depleted uranium” is needed in the current stage of the proxy war in Ukraine if at all Kiev is to launch a “credible counter-offensive” in spring when the tide of the war has distinctly turned in Russia’s favour.
Equally, both must be well aware that the legality of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is still an open issue. In response to NATO’s bombing campaign, former Yugoslavia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice on April 29, 1999, against the ten NATO members directly involved in the attack — Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US — citing a series of violations of the law of nations (which included the obligation not to use prohibited weapons.)
Although the ICJ rejected Belgrade’s request for provisional measures, it, nonetheless, declared itself profoundly concerned with the use of force in Yugoslavia, which “under the present circumstances … raises very serious issues of international law.” Suffice to say, the cases brought by Yugoslavia against the NATO respondents still remain on the ICJ’s docket although the petitioner got dismembered.
Make no mistake, Washington and London are consciously repeating the war crime in the former Yugoslavia. The Anglo-Saxon clique’score objective is a calculated escalation of the proxy war that is certain to draw forth a robust reaction by Moscow, as predictable as night follows day.
Indeed, that is precisely what happened when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday that Russia will deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Putin linked this to a request from Belarus in reaction to Baroness Goldie’s statement in London a week ago.
More importantly, Putin also drew the analogy of the US placing its tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of the allied NATO countries for decades.
The EU and NATO went ballistic after Putin’s disclosure. EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell said on Sunday called out Moscow’s decisionas “an irresponsible escalation and threat to European security.” He threatened to impose “further sanctions” against Belarus!
A NATO spokeswoman called Moscow’s decision “dangerous and irresponsible.” Interestingly, though, the Biden administration neatly side-stepped the issue, focusing instead that the US has not seen any signs that Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus or anywhere else!
In good measure, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby added, “We’ve in fact seen no indication he (Putin) has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine.”
But then, Putin also made it clear that Russia would first complete construction on a storage facility in Belarus for the tactical nuclear weapons by July 1.
Kirby is fudging. What is the game plan? First, the Anglo-Saxon clique would hope that the issue will create further antagonism in Europe against Russia and Putin personally and would rally European countries behind the Biden administration at a time when fault lines were appearing within the transatlantic alliance over a protracted war in Ukraine that might be catastrophic for European economies.
Washington is hard-pressed to respond to Putin’s remark that Russia is only doing something that the US has been doing for decades. The point is, a mutual commitment not to deploy nuclear weapons in third countries was one of the proposals Moscow made to Washington in December 2021, alongside a commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. The US ignored it and precipitated the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.
The crux of the matter is, as with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Russian decision on tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus is retaliatory, drawing attention to the US missiles stationed close to its borders. (An estimated 100 nuclear weapons are stored in vaults in five European countries — Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey.)
Worse still, the US practices a controversial arrangement known as “nuclear sharing”, under which it installs nuclear equipment on fighter jets of select non-nuclear NATO countries and train their pilots to carry out nuclear strike with US nuclear bombs. This is when the US, being a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has promised not to hand over nuclear weapons to other countries, and the non-nuclear countries in the NATO’s sharing arrangement have themselves promised not to receive nuclear weapons from the nuclear weapon states!
NATO declared last year that seven NATO countries have contributeddual-capable aircraft to the nuclear sharing mission. These countries are believed to be the US, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey and Greece. And all are signatories to the NPT!
Welcome to the rules based order!What is perfectly permissible to the “collective West” is forbidden for Russia!
Finally, the diplomatic pirouette has yet another dimension: Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium weaponry to Ukraine is confirming its reputation as the most reckless and unscrupulous state in the whole NATO alliance.
For, there is no question that depleted uranium munitions are radioactive and toxic and their heavy use in the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars has been linked to birth defects and cancers. It has been tied to “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” in Fallujah, the city subjected to two brutal US sieges during the invasion of Iraq.
Ironically, the toxicity of depleted uranium munitions has been accepted by many NATO countries and the European Parliament has called for its use to be banned.So, what is Britain up to, behaving like an outlier?
The heart of the matter is that Britain is creating conditions in Europe to base nuclear-armed US bombers in Britain at Lakenheath in Suffolk (which were removed in 1991 in line with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.)
At a time when the peace movement in Britain is moribund, count on the Russian retaliation to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus to trigger calls for yet another tit for tat escalation from warmongers and Russophobes. Expect the US bombers to return to Lakenheath in a near future.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow last week, and Western circles predictably responded by accusing Russia of becoming “subservient” or even a “vassal state” to China.
MEP Guy Verhofstadt, a Euro-fantasist and former prime minister of Belgium, jeered on Twitter, “Putin’s appalling legacy now includes turning Russia more and more into a Chinese vassal state,” oblivious to the irony of his own words. As the United States took the lead in denouncing China’s peace plan for the Ukraine conflict, publicly setting out the conditions on which it should end, the European Union was nowhere to be seen, or at least had nothing original to say.
This makes Verhofstadt’s comments a damning display of lacking self-awareness. Russia and China are setting out their vision for a new multipolar world, while the US struggles against them in seeking to maintain its hegemonic position. Meanwhile, the European Union has been reduced to the status of a mere bench player in it all, and has become effectively irrelevant. The failure of EU countries to stake out their own will and position amidst the larger powers, as well as their total subservience to the US, has made a mockery of the “strategic autonomy” concept once championed by Emmanuel Macron.
“Strategic autonomy” is a principle of European integration where the EU should be an actor in a multipolar world, which advocates for its own interests and pursues its own agenda. Supporters of this principle insist that the EU should not blindly follow the will of the US when it comes to every foreign policy issue, but should be proactive and enhance its role on the world stage. Therefore, they should not, as is commonly demanded by Washington, take sides on matters such as a new Cold War with China. The term gained growing traction during the years of the Trump administration, when Europe’s relations with the US hit a low due to his particular interpretation of the “America first” doctrine.
However, the practical reality of “strategic autonomy” is that the EU is not a unitary state, but a loose intergovernmental organization of states which, while seeking to establish common positions on a principle of unity, do not truly have a unified foreign-policy-making mechanism. The intra-institutional politics of the EU are often a messy compromise and battle of wills between different levels of actors, including the states themselves, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. This combines with the reality that “European integration” has been a broken process since 2008. Challenges such as the Eurozone financial crisis, Brexit, Covid-19, and internal conflicts with various states such as Poland have all weakened and fractured the EU.
As a result, the EU has been ill-suited to deal with what is, despite media misdirection, the single most explicit source of foreign influence and interference against it, the US. Washington has multiple channels whereby it exerts control over the EU’s many foreign policy actors. Firstly, it uses a web of government-funded think tanks and associated journalists to control public opinion and steer EU countries towards supporting its objectives. Secondly, the US has an extraordinarily political hold over the former Soviet bloc states to the east of the EU (with the exception of Hungary), which it uses to foment increased antagonism against Russia and China, and therefore undermines the attempts of the bloc’s most “autonomous” and powerful states – Germany and France – to pursue more reconciliatory foreign policies.
Thirdly, the US uses the United Kingdom as its primary cheerleader in Europe (be it from within or without the EU) to project its political will onto the continent and override the will of any defiant member states. An example of this is the BBC World Service acting as a massive propaganda machine to push narratives in line with Washington’s foreign policies. Additionally, the US has shown an ability to work with and weaponize the intelligence services of member states against their own countries, such as using Danish intelligence to spy on other European leaders.
Through all these factors, both past and present, the US has been able to keep Europe divided, conflicted, and seemingly unable to pursue any foreign policy which actually meets European interests, as opposed to those of the US. This has culminated even to the extent of literally destroying the Nord Stream pipelines and then propagating a false narrative that Ukraine was responsible. The Ukraine war has ultimately only accelerated the isolation and irrelevance of Europe, which has strengthened the hold of the military-industrial complex over the continent, undermined its energy industries, and thus converted the term “strategic autonomy” into a laughing stock.
One might ask, who is truly the vassal? If a new multipolar world is emerging, it’s fair to say, Europe simply isn’t part of it. Russia, China, and America are the drivers of current events, the EU is but a passenger.
The United States and its European allies have sent tens of billions of dollars-worth of military equipment to Kiev to fuel a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Moscow has warned repeatedly about the consequences of these actions for regional and global security.
Western countries won’t be able to deliver enough weapons in Ukraine to outgun Russia, President Vladimir Putin has assured.
“Threats exist, of course. When weapons are supplied to a country we are in conflict with, this is always a threat. As for how they can be assessed, of course we know about the plans to supply them,” Putin said in an interview with Russian TV on Saturday, responding to a question about whether Moscow considers Western arms deliveries to Kiev a “threat” to national security.
“We see, hear about and know about these delivery plans. You mentioned one million shells, about the delivery of tanks. One million – is it a lot or a little? This is a significant amount. First of all, the leading NATO countries, let’s say the United States of America, according to our information, produce about 14,000-15,000 shells per month… Ukraine’s Armed Forces, according to our military’s estimates, use up to 5,000 shells per day of hostilities,” Putin said.
Russia is aware of NATO’s plans to ramp up shell production to 42,000 per month by this year, and to 750,000 per year by 2025, Putin said. “We don’t know yet what will happen in 2025, but right now, this year, 14,000-15,000 shells are being produced, despite the fact that Ukraine’s military is spending up to 5,000 per day,” he noted.
“We are concerned about [weapons deliveries] from the perspective that this is an attempt to prolong the conflict,” Putin said, noting that “from the point of view of the logic of those who provoked this conflict and are trying to preserve it at any cost, [the supply of weapons] is probably the right decision. But in my opinion, this will only lead to a greater tragedy,” he said.
Emphasizing that Russia will not allow for the “excessive militarization” of its economy, Putin said that to date, Moscow hasn’t reduced civilian construction, health care, education and infrastructure development, but the West will be forced to do so.
“The [NATO] ‘arsonists’ plan to send between 420 and 440 tanks to Ukraine. Here it is the same thing as with ammunition. During this period, we will produce and modernize over 1,600 tanks, Putin said. “The total number of tanks of the Russian Army will be three times greater than the number of tanks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Even more than three times,” he added.
Depleted Uranium Weapons
Putin disagreed with claims being made by Western officials and media that the depleted uranium weapons being sent to Kiev won’t result in any health or other consequences.
“This, of course, is not the case. The fact is that they do not belong to the category of weapons of mass destruction. That’s true. But the core of the projectile with depleted uranium (different materials can be used, it is used for armor-piercing purposes) still generates so-called radiation dust, and in this sense it of course amounts to a weapon of the most dangerous kind,” he said.
Russia has the means to respond, Putin warned. “Without exaggeration, we have hundreds of thousands, namely hundreds of thousands of such rounds. We haven’t used them yet,” he said.
The Russian president didn’t rule out that the UK’s announcement of DU munitions deliveries to Kiev were “deliberate” and designed specifically to try to disrupt this week’s talks between himself and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss Beijing’s 12 point Ukraine peace plan.
“On the same day that President Xi Jinping told me about the positive aspects of the Chinese plan to resolve the Ukrainian [crisis] by peaceful means, we learned about the supply of millions of shells to Ukraine from the Western countries which served as the instigators of the conflict. The next day, right before our meeting with the press, we learned about this story that the UK is planning to send depleted uranium shells,” Putin said. “It’s as if the West did this on purpose to somehow disrupt our negotiations or influence them somehow.”
The UK’s announcement of plans to send DU munitions to Kiev this week have sparked fears that wide swathes of Ukraine could become another depleted uranium-contaminated wasteland similar to parts of the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, where cancers and other illnesses have shot up dramatically in the aftermath of US and British DU use in the 1990s and 2000s. The Russian military’s chief of Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops warned Friday that the use of such arms would “cause irreparable harm to the health of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the civilian population.”
Tactical Nukes in Belarus
Putin also commented on matters of strategic security, saying Moscow and Minsk had agreed in principle that, without violating its obligations under the New START Treaty, Russia will be able to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory.
“We agreed that – in this sense, [Belarusian President] Alexander Grigorievich [Lukashenko] is right when he says ‘listen, we are your closest allies. Why do the Americans place nukes on their allies’ territory?’ They also engage, by the way, in the training of their pilots to use these weapons if necessary. We have agreed that if necessary, we will do the same thing, without violating our obligations – I would like to emphasize – without violating our international obligations on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons,” Putin said.
“The United States has been doing this for decades. They have long placed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of allied countries, NATO countries, in Europe. In six states, if memory serves: Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Greece. There are no nukes in Greece right now, but there is a storage facility,” Putin said.
Nord Stream Terrorism
Asked to comment on the investigations surrounding last year’s sabotage attacks against Russia’s Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, Putin expressed his “full agreement” with the sentiment that the blasts were the handiwork of US intelligence.
“An American journalist who has become quite famous in the world now, conducted… an investigation and came to the conclusion, as you know, that this explosion of the gas pipelines was organized by the special services of the United States. I absolutely agree with such conclusions,” Putin said, referring to the investigative work conducted by Seymour Hersh.
Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus . . .
Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the ‘pandemic’, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the ‘pandemic’ became.
Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this ‘pandemic’ remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis’.
In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this ‘pandemic’ really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since ‘Spanish Flu’ a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.
Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, ‘Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.’ But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.
Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.
This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.
It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.
We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.
And it all made perfect sense because it accorded with everything else we knew about the ‘pandemic’: that it was planned, orchestrated and manipulated at a high level by some of the most devious and evil people on the planet. Also, lots of our fellow sceptics and anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine crusaders in the fields of vaccinology and epidemiology confirmed that this was so, with all manner of abstruse technical detail which we absorbed and became almost-expert on. We learned such terms as ‘gain of function’, ‘cytokine storm’, ‘spike protein’, ‘viral load’ and ‘shedding’. Why, we almost became virologists ourselves!
So why do I no longer believe in lab leak theory? Why do I now share the suspicions of Mike Yeadon that there never was a Covid virus? Well, for me the most obvious clue is that the lab-leak theory is currently being pushed heavily by the very same mainstream media which has been lying to us relentlessly about mask efficacy, vaccine safety, Net Zero, climate change, Ukraine, CBDCs, 15 Minute Cities and the now very obvious threat posed by the New World Order. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that they might suddenly have alighted on a topic where they are not going to push the nefarious agenda of their sinister paymasters. But if they did it would be a first.
Like Patrick Henningsen – more details on our recent podcast – I take the view that if lab-leak is now the officially endorsed conspiracy theory of the US government then we should all be suspicious that there is an underlying agenda. Promoting lab-leak serves a number of purposes: it distracts from the more pressing issue of vaccine injury; it promotes the notion that the world is potentially swarming with rogue, bio-engineered viruses which require urgent defensive measures by supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisation, including compulsory vaccination against new viral strains; it fingers China as an even bigger enemy than it really is, justifying higher defence spending, escalated economic warfare and potential military action, and it creates further division within the sceptical community.
I notice plenty of evidence of the latter in the comments section below Mike Yeadon’s latest piece at TCW, headlined ‘Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus’. Commenters who were previously united in the – correct – view that the ‘pandemic’ was a massive scam and that the ‘vaccines’ are a monstrous and unnecessary assault on public health are now bickering furiously over whether or not they believe in the Covid virus or in viruses generally.
Most of those defending the existence of the Covid virus do so on the basis of the personal health experiences I invoked at the beginning. I’m not disputing that they may have felt all the exotic and unpleasant symptoms they describe, nor even that these were quite unlike any they had had before. What I am questioning is the logical leap which leads them all to infer that these were definitely the result of a novel virus. How could they possibly know? There are any number of other potential causes for these symptoms: radiation or chemical poisoning; the effects of 5G; a fairly routine brand of flu rebadged as Covid – and escalated in their imagination through groupthink into something much worse; terrain theory . . .
I remain open-minded on the cause of those symptoms, as I do on ‘virus theory’ versus ‘terrain theory’, or whether maybe it’s a mixture of both. But it seems evident to me that certain facts about the supposed pandemic of 2020 are now beyond dispute: it was a ‘pandemic’ only because the WHO changed its definition of the word; mortality rates were not above normal; the PCR tests were fraudulent; SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated; the pandemic was wargamed in 2019 at Event 201, and heavily promoted by vested interests (most funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in the media, academe, the bio-medical establishment and client governments. Given the scale of the dishonesty surrounding this fake crisis, it would hardly constitute an extravagant leap to infer that the ‘virus’, like everything else, was just another fabricated part of the psyop.
And you don’t need to plump fully for terrain theory for this to be the case. Nor are you required to believe that China is a force for integrity and goodness, nor that Fauci and Daszak are stand-up guys, nor that there aren’t lots of black-budget-funded labs experimenting with pathogens. All you need to do is accept that the weight of evidence thus far shows that Mike Yeadon, and brave souls like him, are justified in their scepticism about the existence of a novel, possibly man-made virus called SARS-CoV-2. And the fact that in 2020 you had a nasty dose of flu-like symptoms is really neither here nor there.
MOSCOW – The use of uranium ammunition will cause irreversible harm to the health of the military and civilian population of Ukraine, but NATO is ready to supply them to Kiev, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian armed forces, said on Friday.
“Despite the fact that the use of such ammunition [with depleted uranium] will cause irreparable harm to the health of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the civilian population, NATO countries, in particular the UK, express their readiness to supply this type of weapon to the Kiev regime,” Kirillov told a briefing.
Depleted uranium compounds, remaining in the soil after its use as part of projectiles, may be dangerous for people, animals and the environment for a long time, the official added.
After the use of shells with depleted uranium on the territory of Ukraine, significant cultivation areas will be contaminated — through vehicles, radioactive substances will be carried to the territory outside the combat zone, he said.
Lt. Gen. added that use of depleted uranium shells can provoke serious diseases, and the ingestion of dust into the body is a radiation hazard.
“As a result of the impact of a depleted uranium munition, a mobile hot cloud of a finely dispersed aerosol of uranium-238 and its oxides is formed, which, when exposed to the body in the future, can provoke the development of serious diseases,” Kirillov said.
The main radiation hazard from depleted uranium occurs if it enters the body in the form of dust, the official added.
“The flux of alpha-radiation from small uranium particles deposited in the upper and lower respiratory tract, lungs and esophagus cause the development of malignant tumors. Uranium dust accumulating in the kidneys, bone tissue and liver leads to changes in internal organs,” Lt. Gen. explained.
NATO fired about 40,000 shells with more than 15 tons of depleted uranium during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, Kirillov recalled.
“It is necessary to recall that depleted uranium aircraft munitions were used by NATO forces during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In total, about 40,000 armor-piercing air shells with a total amount of depleted uranium of more than 15 tons were used on the territory of this country,” Kirillov told reporters.
The level of uranium contamination of soil and groundwater in Serbia still requires constant monitoring to assess potential risks, the official added.
NATO soldiers have become victims of the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq and Yugoslavia, he stressed.
“The victims of the irresponsible policy of their own leadership were NATO servicemen who took part in military campaigns in Iraq and Yugoslavia,” Kirillov told a briefing.
According to a 2016 report by the Chief Military Medical Inspector of Italy, it is reported that more than 4,000 servicemen of the national armed forces had malignant tumors of various types. These soldiers were deployed in the Balkans in 1994-1999 and in Iraq in 2003 in areas where the alliance forces used depleted uranium ammunition. At the same time, 330 people — 8% of cases — died as a result of the disease, official concluded.
Meanwhile, Kirillov stressed the fact that depleted uranium shells do not have significant advantage over tungsten shells in conditions of modern military operations.
“The use of ammunition containing depleted uranium has no significant advantage over tungsten in the conditions of modern military operations,” he told.
The term depleted uranium is a trivial name for a metal based on over 90% of the isotopes of uranium-238 and less than 1% of uranium-235, the official said.
“The use of depleted uranium in such ammunition is associated with its high density, which ensures a high armor-piercing effect. This effect is achieved by using the kinetic energy of the core itself, as well as its shell. Upon impact with the armor, the shell made of soft steel is destroyed and transfers its energy to the core, which penetrates into the armor,” Kirillov explained.
According to the military, tungsten alloys have similar characteristics, but ammunition based on them is much more expensive to manufacture. Therefore, depleted uranium ammunition is much more often used in those countries where there are uranium reserves, its processing technology, and their use is planned on foreign territory when there is no need to think about environmental consequences.
When it comes to all matters military, I have been following a handful of analysts among whom Croatian Admiral Davorin Domazet (retired) emerged as perhaps my favorite. He has deep and detailed command of technical matters (like Andreiy Martyanov he insists that you can’t prevail in modern warfare without deep knowledge of advanced mathematics and probability). More importantly, he has perhaps the clearest understanding of the broad historical context of today’s clash between Russia and the western powers.
Unfortunately, Admiral Domazet does not give many interviews and none in English, but I thought that his last one was important enough to share more broadly in this article.
If you happen to speak Croatian/Serbian, you can find the interview, published on 17 March 2023 at this link. It runs over 2 hours.
The context is everything
Domazet is the only military analyst that I know of, who takes into account the history of western financial oligarchy, their Venetian roots, migration to Amsterdam where they formed the Dutch Empire, and subsequent move to London which, to this day remains the ideological and spiritual headquarters of the undead British Empire.
He has correctly labelled humanity’s enemy as the “western occult oligarchy,” and has even called the war in Ukraine as the clash between Christ and anti-Christ, underlining that the anti-Christ is in the west. Mind you, Croatia is a NATO member state and is, like Poland, a catholic Slavic nation, sharing even some of its cultural Russophobia (though it may not bequite as rabid in Croatia as it is in Poland).
About Russia’s hypersonic weapons
However, the part of Domazet’s last interview that I found particularly worth sharing was what he laid out about Russia’s hypersonic weapons.
It was in 2018 that Vladimir Putin took the stage to present Russia’s new hypersonic weapons. The term “hypersonic” refers to missiles that fly at speeds of 5 mach and higher. At the time, many in the west dismissed Putin’s claims and thought it was a bluff. We now know that he wasn’t bluffing. Russia is the only country in the world that has deployment-ready hypersonic missiles – not one but three types: Zircons, Kinzhals and Avantguards.
Domazet explained why these weapons are radical game changers in warfare. Namely, in World War 1, tanks were the game changing military technology. Since World War 2, it’s been the air-force. Aircraft carrier strike groups have been an irresistible force wherever they travelled, dominating the seas ever since. But hypersonic precision missiles have rendered that force obsolete overnight.
The main military front in today’s global conflict, according to Domazet, are the Anti-Ballistic (ABM) batteries which the US has set up on the Poland-Romania axis, and the Russians on the North Pole-Kaliningrad-Crimea-Syria axis. These are defensive systems, conceived to intercept incoming nuclear missiles (though they can easily be converted to offensive nuclear missiles). However, today’s ABM systems are only effective against missiles flying at speeds up to mach 3.5 (3.5 x the speed of sound).
The Kinzhal turns mighty aircraft carrier strike groups into sitting ducks
Russia’s new Kinzhal missile flies at speeds of mach 12 to mach 15 and nothing in western defensive arsenals can stop its strike. During the war in Ukraine, Russia staged a stunning demonstration of its power. The first Kinzhal strike, delivered one month after the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, was perhaps the most significant: Russian forces targeted a large weapons depot in Ukraine which had been built during the Soviet times to withstand a nuclear strike. It was buried 170 meters (over 500 ft) underground and protected by several layers of armored concrete.
The Kinzhal flies at altitudes of between 20 and 40 km, with a maximum range of 2,000 km. When above target, it dives perpendicularly and accelerates to 15 mach, generating enormous kinetic energy in addition to its explosive payload. That first strike with a single Kinzhal missile destroyed Ukraine’s nuke-proof underground weapons depot. This was a message for the west.
Moscow calling: we can sink ALL your carriers
The Kinzhal was developed with the express purpose of destroying aircraft carrier strike groups. If it could destroy a warehouse built to withstand a nuclear strike, it can cut through an aircraft carrier like a hot knife through butter.
According to Admiral Domazet, neither the western powers nor China are anywhere near having weapons like that. He explained that the critical issue with hypersonic weapons are the extreme temperatures reached during hypersonic flights on the surface of missiles, which can cause them to break apart mid-flight. Russia is the only nation that has developed special materials that enable the missiles to withstand this stress, so their flight can be controlled throughout its trajectory and delivered with pinpoint accuracy.
Western intelligence estimated that Russia had some 50 Kinzhals at the start of the war in Ukraine, and thus far it has used only 9 of them. Last week, they fired six Kinzhals in a single salvo. That too, was a message. Here’s how Domazet explained it: United States have 11 aircraft carrier strike groups. Of these, fewer than half will be active at any one time (while others are in dock for maintenance, or in preparation). Firing six Kinzhals in one go is military-speak for, “we have the capability to sink ALL of your aircraft carriers at once.”
Russia will run out of ammunitions any minute now, (experts say)…
Russia has the capacity to build about 200 Kinzhals per year and now has means of delivering Kinzhal and Zircon missiles anywhere from aircraft, ships and submarines. In addition to destroying aircraft carriers, they can also destroy NATOs ABM missile sites. In a nutshell, Russia is now a clear winner of the 21st century arms race.
It could take the western powers 10 years or longer to catch up and until then, the only way to avoid losing the war is to either concede defeat and accept Russia’s security demands, or to escalate the conflict to nuclear exchange.
A conservative estimate suggests that at least a billion people would perish in such a conflict and nobody would win. Who would do such a thing? The idea of using nuclear weapons is, in fact, so repugnant that we can be assured that our leaders will never chose the path of escalation. Surely, nobody’s that evil, right? Are they?
The US and its allies slapped packages of sanctions on Russia shortly after Moscow had launched its special military operation in Ukraine.
Russian Prime Minister Mishustin stated on Thursday that the US-led Western sanctions barrage targeting Russians has failed.
“At the very beginning, the West tried to assure that the sanctions were not directed against our citizens. And at the time, there were no illusions on this score. But now, even a person far removed from global politics understands that the main target was precisely the Russian people,” the prime minister emphasized during his speech at the State Duma, Russia’s lower house.
He said that the West “stopped at nothing”, even going as far as blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipeline network and seizing banking accounts.
Also, they “disconnected [Russia] from the international payment system, trying to block all banking and any other economic activity [of the country],” Mishustin pointed out.
The Russian PM emphasized that despite the sanctions, “goods and services-related payments as well as money transfers are being carried out just like before.”
“All bank cards in Russia that were previously in use are still working. The government also managed to reduce inflationary pressure and preserve the banking sector’s stability,” Mishustin stressed.
He recalled that last spring, “analysts were predicting a probable double-digit decline in Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP),” but he emphasized “we weathered the storm.” “It was a tricky task. The economic slowdown, [which was] inevitable under such conditions, was quite mild. Nevertheless, We’ve put the economy back on the growth track,” he added.
The Russian prime minister highlighted that in this regard the government had created “all the necessary work conditions for those companies that see their future in Russia, including firms from unfriendly states.”
“Despite all the restrictions, the negation of property rights, and the discriminatory measures that Russian businesses faced in the West, foreign companies feel comfortable when working in Russia,” Mushustin noted. He warned that “if foreign firms ditch their business operations in Russia and fail to take care of the future of their enterprises and employees, we will protect the interests of our people.”
The PM cautioned that “external pressure” on the Russian economy is unlikely to show signs of easing any time soon, and that “the period of [the economy’s] adaptation will end in 2024. Moreover, Russia will embark on the path of long-term progressive development.”
Last year, Western governments began to slap sweeping sanctions on the Russian economy over Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine. However, these measures finally boomeranged on the economies of the US-led West as these restrictive measures sent inflation (especially in the energy sector) skyrocketing to record highs while simultaneously driving their societies into a cost of living crisis.
Although Western media were boasting about Sberbank’s 78% plunge in profit in 2022 due to US-led sanctions, with CEO German Gref acknowledging a “most difficult year”, it appears that the US economic system is the one actually on the brink as four banks have already collapsed, with dozens more expected to follow.
CNN described the Russian bank’s drop in profit as a “collapse” in its headline, but then had to admit in the article that “Sberbank’s resilience in the face of sanctions helped Russia’s banking sector recover from a loss-making first half in 2022.”
This is in line with Gref’s belief that this year’s profits should be close to the record 1.25 trillion rubles ($16.5 billion) earned in the “pre-crisis year.” “Our business model passed another strength test,” he added.
It is recalled that Russian Presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on March 14 that there is “practically” no risk of Russia facing a fallout from the SVB collapse, adding that: “Our banking system has certain connections with some segments of the international financial system, but it is mostly under illegal restrictions.”
Despite alarmist headlines from US media and experts, Peskov was proven correct as no Russian bank has collapsed despite Western sanctions. Meanwhile, the full repercussions of SVB’s downfall are yet to be felt, with former Lehman Brothers executive Lawrence McDonald believing that up to another 50 American banks could collapse if structural problems are not fixed.
“So Lehman failed and then it forced this too-big-to-fail system, and then, now this interest rate shock to the regional banks is moving hundreds of billions of dollars out of regional banks into the big banks… So you could have another 50 bank failures… unless they fix the structural problem,” said McDonald on March 22.
“There’s going to be further damage. They have to cut rates and then they have to have a deposit guarantee, a larger one, that’s what they’re going to come up with… That’s a bailout. That’s basically the federal government taking on bank deposit risk,” he added.
By being cut-off from the Western banking system, Russia is effectively protected from the series of bank collapses that are expected to follow. Russia faced a credit crunch due to the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, which ultimately led to the Global Financial Crisis, a demonstration of how it too was exposed to weaknesses in the US economy.
Although Russia was cut-off from SWIFT only two-days after the special military operation began, in addition to many other Western restrictions, including a $60 per barrel oil price cap, President Vladimir Putin boasted about the resilience of the Russian economy.
The IMF reported that Russia’s economy contracted by 2.2% in 2022 and will start growing again in 2023, expanding by 0.3%, and then 2.1% in 2024. This is impressive when considering that fellow European countries, which are not sanctioned, will be struggling immensely. The UK is expected to contract by 0.6% and Germany will have a growth of only 0.1%.
At the same time, the OECD forecasts that US economic growth would slow from 1.5% this year to 0.9% next year. This is due to higher interest rates slowing down demand. Bloomberg on March 21, citing sources, reported that the US Treasury Department is studying the possibility of guaranteeing all bank deposits in the event of a recession in the banking sector.
The current banking crisis has forced economists, including from the esteemed JPMorgan Chase, to make new recession forecasts after any hopes of recovery were snuffed away.
“The Fed is facing a difficult task on Wednesday, but it is likely already past the point of no return,” JPMorgan strategists wrote in a note to clients on March 22. “A soft landing now looks unlikely, with the airplane in a tailspin (lack of market confidence) and engines about to turn off (bank lending).”
Goldman Sachs also echoed JPMorgan and said in mid-March that the banking crisis could deliver a severe blow to economic growth.
For his part, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has warned multiple times, including as recently as March 9 but even from before the banking crisis, that the economy could be heading for a “Wile E. Coyote moment,” referencing a Looney Tunes character who was always blissfully unaware that he was about to hit the ground after running off the edge of a cliff.
However, the expected collapse of many banks in the US and the impending economic crisis has not deterred the determination of the Biden administration to fanatically arm, fund and train the Ukrainian military and regime. With millions of Americans on the verge of dropping out of the Middle Class, Washington continues to send tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, and all the while Western sanctions are now beginning to have a minimum effect on the Russian economy, thus effectively rendering them nearly useless.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
At least three naval drones were involved in an early morning attack on Russian warships stationed at the port of Sevastopol, local Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev has reported. The city hosts Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and is occasionally targeted by Ukrainian forces.
The Russian Navy’s assets were not damaged in Wednesday’s raid, but the windows of several buildings near the coast were shattered by blast waves from the destroyed drones, the senior official wrote on social media. Russian air defenses were used to engage an aerial target during the incident, he added.
Despite sporadic attacks by Ukraine on the city of Sevastopol, located on the Crimean Peninsula, the use of naval drones, which can carry more explosives than their airborne equivalents, is a rare event.
The last major incident involving such weapons was reported by the Russian military in late October last year, when Kiev deployed seven unmanned watercraft and nine unmanned aircraft against ships in Sevastopol harbor. Ukrainian forces managed to damage a Natya-class minesweeper, the Defense Ministry said at the time.
The Russian military claimed the Ukrainian operation was conducted with the help of British advisers and targeted vessels that were providing safe passage for ships under a UN-mediated Black Sea grain deal. The Defense Ministry briefly suspended participation in the scheme as a result.
The grain deal, which allows Ukraine to export agricultural produce by sea, was extended for a second time last week. Moscow warned that the UN had 60 more days to deliver on the promise to have Western nations lift the restrictions hampering Russian grain and fertilizer trade, which it gave when the original agreement was signed.
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
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