Why Are Hospitals Still Using Remdesivir?
By Stella Paul | Brownstone Institute | May 30, 2023
Nobody believes in Remdesivir anymore. How can you possibly make a case for it? Remdesivir is so lethal it got nicknamed “Run Death Is Near” after it started killing thousands of Covid patients in the hospital. The experts claimed that Remdesivir would stop Covid; instead, it stopped kidney function, then blasted the liver and other organs.
As word got around, some patients started showing up in the emergency room with signs saying, “NO REMDESIVIR” and refusing to take it. (Not that their refusal helped: many were given it anyway, often without their knowledge.)
When I heard that Remdesivir is still being used, I couldn’t believe it. How could hospitals be so brazen as to push this killer drug, even after the lawsuits started flying? Fourteen California families are now suing three hospitals, claiming their loved ones suffered wrongful deaths from what they call “the Remdesivir protocol.” Expect other lawsuits to follow, because the Remdesivir carnage was nationwide.
I began to poke around to see if hospitals are still giving Remdesivir and I think I’ve found the smoking gun. Two smoking guns, in fact. First, it’s still listed on the NIH web site as its standard of care for Covid. Second (and in my opinion, more importantly), the CMS.gov official website says, “The COVID-19 public health emergency (PCE) ended at the end of the day on May 11, 2023.” Two sentences later, it states, “The enhanced payments described on this page will end on September 30, 2023.” And there it is, listed in bold: Remdesivir.
Allow me to translate the bureaucratese. “Even though we acknowledge the Covid emergency is over, the federal government will continue to pay lavish bonuses to hospitals who kill their patients with Remdesivir through the end of the fiscal year.”
Money; it all comes down to money. There’s SO much money in the Covid con game. The CARES Act of 2020 slathered $2 trillion across the country to deal with Covid, and lots of it went to hospitals. The 20 largest hospitals enjoyed a 62 percent increase in their combined net assets during those glorious Covid years, providing many top executives with a $10 million salary or more.
Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir.
And here’s the kicker: the feds did not allow hospitals to even consider using safe, cheap drugs like ivermectin.
“Remdesivir caused a lot of renal failures,” Ralph Lorigo told me. Mr. Lorigo is a lawyer in Buffalo who spent last year helping families rescue loved ones who were trapped inside hospitals that were killing them. “If you got Covid, the hospital put you on this government protocol and didn’t even check if you have kidney disease. There was a real lack of monitoring.”
“I was surprised when the FDA approved it, even though The World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against using it. But Big Pharma had the strength to push it through.”
He added, “Hospitals had stopped doing elective cases, which is how they made money. So now they made money giving people Remdesivir and putting them on ventilators, which the government also paid big bonuses for. Every day you’re on a vent, it’s damaging you. When I managed to get people out of the hospital and off the vent and they got ivermectin, they lived. When I couldn’t get into court or lost the case, they died.”
It’s way past time for there to be a hard stop on the use of Remdesivir. And we must work fast to save the children. “In late April 2022, the FDA even approved remdesivir as the first and only COVID-19 treatment for children under 12, including babies as young as 28 days, an approval that boggles the mind, considering COVID-19 is rarely serious in children while remdesivir is ineffective and carries a risk of serious, and deadly, side effect,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola.
In all my reporting on the Hospital Death Protocol, I’ve never heard a single person say, “You’re wrong. My mother perked right up when they gave her Remdesivir and the ventilation made her bounce out of bed. They saved her life!”
Instead, my inbox and Twitter feed are filled with messages that would make you break down and cry. The Bereaved Army in America needs an investigation into exactly who shattered their lives and why.
Stella Paul is the pen name of a writer in New York who has covered medical issues for over a decade. In 2021, she lost her husband in a locked down nursing home in New York City where he had been brutally isolated for almost a year. He died one week after getting the vaccine. Stella is focused on exposing the Hospital Death Protocol to honor her husband’s memory and to support thousands of bereaved families.
Conspirators for the Constitution: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition
By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 30, 2023
Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.
This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.
This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.
This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.
This was never about so-called threats to democracy.
In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.
Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.
Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.
No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.
The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.
Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.
Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”
All of us are in danger.
In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.
For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
And then there is the treatment being meted out to those such as Julian Assange, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.
Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers.
The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
We’re almost at that point now.
Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.
We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Joe Biden Launches His War on Antisemitism
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 30, 2023
As promised, the White House hosted a virtual event followed by the issuance of a fact sheet and detailed strategic report last Thursday that described in some detail a sweeping plan that will be implemented to confront what it describes as surging antisemitism. I reported last week how the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who participated in the ceremony, has articulated the Biden Administration’s somewhat hyperbolic view that “Antisemitism is not a niche issue…it is an existential threat to democracy.” She had also regretted that “America has never done something like a national plan to fight antisemitism.” It should be noted that Lipstadt’s brief as ambassador is to confront what she perceives to be antisemitism all around the world, though it is likely that her role will expand to include domestic authorities under whatever new arrangements emerge as the Biden plan is implemented.
The plan that was unveiled was developed by an interagency task force created by Joe Biden last December, which was headed by “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff, who is both Jewish and has the misfortune to be married to Kamala Harris. It reportedly incorporates contributions and insights from claimed discussions with no less than “more than 1,000 community leaders” including various Jewish religious denominations and also representing both Jewish and non-Jewish civic organizations in the United States. Prior to the virtual event and press release, President Biden promised that the plan would “include more than 200 measures that government agencies, social media platforms and elected officials can adopt to counter rising antisemitism.” The measures will reportedly include at least 100 “provisions” that will require congressional action.
That the plan will be considered a success by inter alia suppressing what once passed as free speech in the United States seems to have bothered none of the Jewish groups that applauded the development. Occasionally sensible liberal leaning J Street enthused how “In a period when the threats of antisemitism, far-right extremism and white nationalism are surging in the United States, it’s deeply encouraging to see the White House make this a top priority and adopt a nuanced, well-considered, comprehensive approach.”
J Street’s President Jeremy Ben-Ami, who describes George Soros as a “Jewish philanthropist,” misses the point that Israel, which will be a principal beneficiary from stomping down on the First Amendment as nearly any criticism of the Jewish state will become a “hate crime, is preeminently a country awash in “far-right extremism.” He slyly concludes that “The struggle against antisemitism and all forms of bigotry is far too important to become a mere proxy for debates over Israel,” making the entire issue vanish in typical J Street fashion. Nor does that particular irony appear to have bothered any Congressmen or anyone in the mainstream media, such is the power of the Jewish establishment over both the press and the two joined-at-the-hip on this issue political parties that alternately govern us.
Note how the Plan, relying on wildly exaggerated statistics relating to what are often contrived or alleged antisemitic incidents, not by coincidence, seeks to protect Jews from a malignant force which is presumed to be the “white supremacists” that Biden and his cohorts have been otherwise targeting and also labeling as “terrorists.” That accomplishes two things politically: it gets the powerful Jewish/Israel Lobby and their controlled media fully on board to reelect Biden and it also identifies the enemy as likely to be conservative Republicans. In so doing, you take highly visible steps to protect the Jews (whether or not they actually need protection) and you create a credible enemy that everyone can identify and attack.
So what does the White House’s May 25th press release entitled “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” tell us about what will be put in place to protect America’s wealthiest and already most powerful ethno-religious group? A sub-heading and the lead paragraphs summarize it this way: “[The] Administration announces over 100 new actions and over 100 calls to action to combat antisemitism, including new actions to counter antisemitism on college campuses and online; whole-of-society strategy includes new stakeholder commitments.
“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is releasing the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. This strategy includes over 100 new actions the Administration will take to raise awareness of antisemitism and its threat to American democracy, protect Jewish communities, reverse the normalization of antisemitism, and build cross-community solidarity.
“While antisemitic incidents most directly and intensely affect the Jewish community, antisemitism threatens all of us. Antisemitic conspiracy theories fuel other forms of hatred, discrimination, and bias—including discrimination against other religious minorities, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQI+ hate. Antisemitism seeks to divide Americans from one another, erodes trust in government and nongovernmental institutions, and undermines our democracy.”
The Fact Sheet and the full report explain in frightening detail how Biden is dedicating significant financial and human resources to essentially pander to Jews and Israel over their concerns that they are being perceived badly, something that might be attributed to their own behavior. Admittedly, some concerns were expressed that Israel would be immune from criticism in spite of the fact that it is widely recognized as an apartheid state that commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis. Most recently this has included a Flag Day march in East Jerusalem in which settlers chanted “Death to Arabs.” The Times of Israel subsequently printed an article calling for the extermination of the Palestinians. Willfully blind to that reality, the fact sheet has only this to say: “In addition, the strategy reaffirms the United States’ unshakable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security—and makes clear that when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.” In other words, because Israel is the self-designated Jewish state criticism of it will be ipso facto regarded as a hate crime, antisemitism.
I will not bore the reader by reviewing most of the 60 page long “Strategy” report’s more intrusive features, but it is worth observing that it commits itself to have “The US government…harness our collective resources to increase education about antisemitism and its threat to democracy, the Holocaust, and Jewish contributions to American society.” “Collective resources” of course includes taxpayer money, which will be flowing in the billions to Jewish businesses and facilities for “protection,” as is already happening with Department of Homeland Security discretionary grants, more than 90% of which support increased security for Jews and their organizations.
The “Strategy’s” four “Pillars” as elaborated in both the fact sheet and the full text are:
- Pillar 1: Increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism, including its threat to America, and broaden appreciation of Jewish American heritage
- Pillar 2: Improve safety and security for Jewish communities
- Pillar 3: Reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination
- Pillar 4: Build cross-community solidarity and collective action to counter hate
One should expect major initiatives in requiring educational courses in holocaust and other Jewish issues, compulsory training and re-education sessions both in government and the corporate world on the threat posed by antisemitism, and creating law enforcement mechanisms backed by new legislation that will provide empowerment to investigate and criminalize various antisemitic acts as “hate crimes.” One “Strategic Goal” that might be of particular interest to readers of this article might be “Tackling Antisemitism Online,” which includes “Ensure terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism. The Administration commends platforms with terms of service and community standards that establish ‘zero-tolerance’ for hate speech, including antisemitism. All online platforms are encouraged to adopt zero-tolerance terms of service and community standards” and “to permanently ban repeat offenders, both personal accounts and extremist websites.” It calls for “algorithms” to be employed on social media sites to block any and all antisemitic content. Somewhat bizarrely, it also calls for “Establish[ing] relationships with Jewish community organizations to share best practices related to reporting hate speech and utilizing platforms to lift up Jewish stories.”
So, in effect, the US government’s national security agencies would be answering to and propagandizing for “Jewish community organizations,” which one might think to be inappropriate. But the fact sheet and report itself do not mention what legislation will be in the works to penalize those who choose to be non-cooperative, though the model would likely be the laws that have been passed in 26 states and counting to punish or deny benefits to those who either support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or are in favor of any nonviolent action directed against Israel. Note particularly that “college campuses” are explicitly mentioned as targets by the White House fact sheet since BDS, seen as a major threat by the Israeli government and by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), is increasingly popular among students at a number of universities.
And speaking of BDS, where even Biden has perhaps hesitated to go too deep too directly, there is always a boneheaded congressmen who is ready to take up the pander to Israel mission. Senator Marco Rubio, who has never been bothered by having to think anything through, has introduced a bill that would prevent US companies and individuals from participating in boycotts of countries “friendly to the US.” Israel is not named in the legislation, but the Congressmen involved have freely admitted that it is directed particularly against BDS. Rubio claims that “The BDS movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state of Israel. This bill, which previously passed the Senate, would mark an important step toward bringing an end to the movement’s discriminatory efforts.” The bill’s cosponsor Republican Senator Bill Hagerty added that it would “Provide state and local governments [with] the tools they need to counter ‘the discriminatory and hate-inspired conduct of the anti-Semitic BDS movement aimed against Israel our closest ally in the Middle East.’”
Make no mistake, the “Strategy” and all that will develop from it is misguided, overkill, and the death of freedom to speak, write and associate. It is a consequence of the immense Jewish power over the United States government and is in no way justified by developments. One notes how conservative critics of the Biden Administration Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have recently been called antisemites without any real evidence demonstrating that to be the case. Joe Biden’s plan of action will surely similarly open the door to what will quickly become an open season on alleged antisemites. It will subsequently be easy for politicians and the media to label critics of domestic issues like the state of the Mexican border or international issues like the pointless and highly dangerous war against Russia as “haters” and by a tortuous extension antisemites. Appropriate punishment will follow.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Is BBC Verify Britain’s Answer to the Disinformation Governance Board?
BY TONY MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 29, 2023
A surprise popped up on my Twitter feed last week – the launch of BBC Verify, as announced by BBC journalist Marianna Spring. Apparently, the state broadcaster is now going to verify what is fact and what is fake news. Better late than never, I suppose, given the BBC’s relentless promotion of pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine misinformation during the Pandemic. However, as the presentation went on it revealed a somewhat different agenda – less of the fact-checking and more of the “searching for conspiracy theories from the far-right”. This was in support of the noble goal of protecting the British people from outbreaks of civil disorder supposedly linked to ‘conspiracy theories’, like the Jan 6th brouhaha. And Spring herself is going to get her hands dirty, at least as much as can be done using such tools as Google Maps and Facebook, along with 60 other BBC journalists. (How much is this costing?)
There was something very familiar about Ms. Spring for U.S. audiences. We had a ‘disinformation tsar’ just like her a year ago in the form of Nina Jankowicz.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decided last year that it had fulfilled its primary mission of securing our borders by throwing them wide open, and instead decided to take on real issues such as rooting out disinformation to protect the homeland. In April 2022, DHS Top Man, Alejandro Majorkas, announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) and the hiring of disinformation ‘expert’ Nina Jankowicz to run it.
Ms. Jankowicz was not exactly well qualified for the job of rooting out fake news. She agreed with the 51 former Intelligence officials who proclaimed the laptop owned by Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation, when in fact the officials’ statement turned out to be disinformation. Ditto the Steele dossier procured by the Hilary campaign to trash Trump in the 2016 Presidential race. She believed this dodgy dossier was true even after reporting in 2017 showed it was not, and after 2019 when the Mueller Report confirmed this beyond doubt. In an unfortunate Tik Tok video, Jankowicz channeled Mary Poppins with an updated version of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ which referenced Democrat Party talking points on Ukraine and Covid. None of this is surprising as Jankowicz’s professional career up until that point had been spent in traditional Democrat Party training grounds such as the National Democratic Institute.
The brief of the DGB (one letter different from the KGB as the Wall Street Journal pointed out) was remarkably similar to that of BBC Verify, although it was based in a state agency as opposed to the state broadcaster. It intended to put a government imprimatur on what was fact and what was disinformation. To most Americans outside of Washington DC this is anathema. Americans believe the arbiter of truth is the individual, not the state, and that belief is enshrined in our Constitution as well as our laws.
Within three weeks of being born, the Disinformation Board was dead. The battle was not won on philosophical or constitutional grounds, but because of the ridicule inspired by Jankowicz’s antics. She came across as a less sympathetic version of Elizabeth Warren, if such a thing is possible, with the icing on the cake being the Mary Poppins video. Although in the minority in both the House and the Senate, Republicans killed the Board by mostly playing or referring to the video.
But a word of warning to those thinking that laughing at Spring and the rest of the BBC Verifiers will bring about another easy victory for free speech. The DHS may have ‘paused’ the Board and got rid of Ms. Jankowicz in May 2022, but the need to fight against certain points of view under the guise of protecting the American people from ‘far-right’ extremism is still being pursued only in more devious ways.
Last week, for example, the Media Research Center published some interesting reporting on the DHS. The DHS has changed the focus of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) from real terrorism to the political Right. In the last two years, it has provided $40 Million in funding for 80 projects by various public institutions and private organisations that seem to be operating under the assumption that ‘far-right’ includes 50% of the American population, and that it is directly tied to white supremacy. One particularly disgraceful chart, taken from material developed by one of the grantees – the University of Dayton – shows the Republican Party, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, Prager U and Quillette, among other perfectly respectable organisations, linked directly to Nazi-supporting fringe organisations.
Given that the organisations at the top of this pyramid supposedly pose the biggest threat to the homeland since Al-Qaeda, it’s remarkable that no-one seems to have more than a hazy idea of who they are. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged that the number of these supposedly dangerous, far-right organisations is down and identifies the threat as follows: “as organisational loyalty has dwindled and the internet has become white nationalism’s organising principle, however, the ideology is best understood as a loose coalition of social networks orbiting online propaganda hubs and forums.” Of course, such vagueness is ideal for the anti-disinfo grant applications – the vaguer things are, the easier it is to conjure up far-right conspiracies. No need to bother with real terrorists coming through our open borders when shadowy people linked to right-of-centre media companies and free speech organisations represent the real threat.
This is BBC Verify’s view as well, if their launch video is anything to go by. Spring defines their journalistic approach as setting up fake accounts on social media, aka ‘trolls’, to monitor sinister stuff going on in chat rooms, FB groups, and no doubt Twitter, now Elon Musk has gone over to the dark side with his support for free speech, a tool of white supremacy. Spring is promising a podcast called ‘Marianna in Conspiracyland’ inspired by Alice In Wonderland (she has to go down various alt-media rabbit holes to chase the conspiracy theorists).
The predilection of these two young women an ocean apart for using children’s literature to articulate their concerns about disinformation is not a coincidence. Our real problems in both the U.S. and the U.K. are largely the responsibility of our dysfunctional governments – porous borders, high inflation, rampant crime, Net Zero, the blowback from the disastrous lockdown policy. The narrative that the real threat to our prosperity and well-being is lurking in dark corners of the Internet is essentially a fairy story.
Washington’s obsession with crushing Russia has dismantled its Middle East agenda
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | May 29, 2023
Once the undisputed hegemonic power in the Middle East, thought to be indispensable for the security and success of a range of regional leaderships, the US has been fading into the background to the benefit of its adversaries.
As armed conflict erupted between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia in February of 2022, the Joe Biden administration in Washington decided to throw its weight behind Kiev and focus on a project to bog down Moscow, while unleashing wave after wave of sanctions. Despite spending at least $75 billion dollars on assistance to Ukraine and making Russia the most sanctioned nation on earth, the US has failed to bring Moscow to its knees. In fact, one could say that it is the US that has been cut down to size in the global arena, especially in the Middle East, an area it once considered its own backyard.
As the months pass, blow after blow has been inflicted on US power in the Middle East. In direct opposition to Washington’s agenda, the Syrian Arab Republic was readmitted to the Arab League following a 12-year hiatus, paving the way to end the crisis in Syria, which the US seeks to prolong. China has also entered Middle East politics in a dramatic way, brokering an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement back in March, and this then spurred a wider normalization wave. Although the US attempted to play off the Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement as an acceptable and welcomed move, this has now clearly worked to collapse Washington’s long-term effort towards regional supremacy, which was based on feeding a proxy conflict between the two powers.
The failure of US sanctions
Western leaders publicly predicted that Russia’s economy would collapse under sanctions, a result which clearly has not materialized, with the IMF predicting the Russian economy will grow. Similarly, the US “maximum pressure” sanctions that were first introduced against Iran under the Trump administration, were expected to severely hinder the Islamic Republic’s ability to continue its developments in the defense field, but have failed to achieve those goals.
Russia is now exporting more oil than it did in 2021, as its relations with China, the primary global competitor to the US, have advanced. Gulf States have also repeatedly let the US down and refrained from yielding to pressure to cut oil production. There is also the example of Algeria, which has become Italy’s largest gas supplier and raked in over $50 billion dollars in oil and gas revenues during 2022 alone, even as it retains close relations with Moscow. And when it comes to the West’s ban on Russian gold bullion, the UAE, Türkiye and China have reportedly stepped in to fill the gap.
However, perhaps the worst blowback against Russia sanctions has been the nullification of previous limits to Moscow-Tehran economic relations. The two nations are already the most sanctioned on earth, so they need not worry about the potential consequences from their trade, which has encouraged further cooperation between them. Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi signed a deal to finance an Iranian railway line as part of a North-South Transport Corridor.
Failed propaganda
The Biden administration has employed hardline propaganda tactics in order to demonize Russia and lionize Ukraine. Although for some Western audiences the arguments set forth may have proven effective, in the global community and especially the Middle East, such rhetoric is tiresome and clearly hypocritical.
After having illegally invaded Iraq, inflicting around a million deaths, over a concoction of factually-challenged conspiracy theories about weapons of mass destruction, it comes off as laughable that the US is now claiming to oppose illegal invasions. Former Bush administration officials, such as Condolezza Rice, have even appeared on national television shows in the US to condemn illegal invasions of foreign countries. Even former US President George W. Bush seemingly condemned the “holy unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean of Ukraine” in a Freudian slip.
The US has positioned itself now as being opposed to the illegal occupation of foreign territory, in addition to claiming it stands in principle against annexation. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked by a CNN correspondent whether his government supported the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights by Israel, he answered: “Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” again demonstrating Washington’s double standards. Washington continues to maintain its recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, which not only defies international law, but also the majority opinion at the United Nations.
The faltering image of the US
From the perspective of Middle Eastern nations, the US is overcommitted to the conflict in Ukraine, even as they have refrained from taking a clear side and instead remained neutral for the most part. Neither the people nor the governments of these countries buy the platitudes espoused by US officials when it comes to Ukraine. The stark difference between the way Palestinians and Ukrainians are portrayed for the exact same actions are enough to make eyes roll.
Now that China is presenting opportunities for countless Middle East nations, especially in the economic sphere, the US has a real competitor. However, the US continues to operate as if the world has not undergone a dramatic shift and refuses to rein in its allies. Ukraine in some respects is getting the special treatment that Israel has enjoyed for years: unlimited aid with few or no questions asked. In the case of Israel, as its government proceeds with introducing controversial legal reforms, takes steps to change the status quo at the al-Aqsa Mosque and pursues hardline far-right policies against the Palestinian people, all coming at a cost to Washington itself, the Biden administration refuses to put it in its place. What Israel is currently doing is embarrassing its own Arab allies that recently normalized ties, even threatening to put a wedge in relations with the likes of neighboring Jordan.
It is this refusal to recalibrate that is not only costing the US its influence, but also evaporating the prize of bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia together, which has clearly been a foreign policy achievement goal dear to the Biden administration. Now that Riyadh and Tehran have restored relations, the excuse of combating Iran’s regional influence is gone for negotiating a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement. The refusal to punish Israel for its constant provocations also makes it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to normalize with an unrestrained Israeli government that continues to insult the Muslim world and invites popular Arab support for the Palestinian cause. If there is no change to the arrogant and out of touch approach of the US, which rules with an iron fist and a “my way or the highway” approach, it will be the US itself that is going to be taking a hike from the Middle East.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
What Are Anti-Drone Systems and How Do They Work?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 29.05.2023
The NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the significance of drones in modern warfare, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used by both sides for reconnaissance, targeting, and kamikaze attacks. What are the four main kinds of anti-drone defenses? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Sputnik explores.
“The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots and as you go forth today remember always – your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”
That was the humorous but eerie prediction by the military school commandant in the 1997 The Simpsons episode “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson.” A quarter of a century later, the idea of using drones in warfare has become ubiquitous, and The Simpsons’ comedic flourish has been forever tainted by real-life conflict.
Although small propeller and rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones fitted with film cameras have been around since the Cold War, modern drone warfare, including camera-mounted, remote-operated GPS-equipped spy and strike drones, is a product of the early 21st century, with the United States kicking off the world’s first campaign of targeted killings using UAVs in 2002.
As small, inexpensive, off-the-shelf drones began entering the commercial market in the 2010s, they started to be used by non-state actors to attack armies and governments – with US-backed terrorists using them in the Syrian dirty war against Syrian and Russian forces, and Yemen’s Houthi militants deploying them against the Saudi-led coalition.
Large, military-grade drones were used to effect in the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenian volunteers in Nagorno-Karabakh, and, starting in 2022, have been deployed extensively by NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Donbass and throughout Ukraine against Russian forces. Russia has countered them using a series of domestically-developed drone defense systems. But more on that below.
Drone Defenses: What Types Are There?
In the second half of the 20th century, the USSR and the USA focused their air and missile defense research on targeting big, expensive manned fighters, bombers, transport planes, and ballistic and cruise missiles. Although this included research into fantastical concepts including the use of powerful lasers in space under Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program, its main focus remained missiles – rocket-powered projectiles designed to intercept and destroy enemy aircraft and missiles.
Can Missiles Be Used to Down Drones?
For drones that are large enough – including unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) like the Bayraktar TB2, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, or the Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk, which have wingspans of 12, 20, or even 40 meters, respectively, the most effective defenses are still good old-fashioned missiles designed to target jet aircraft.
Last month, Russian Air Defense Force Commander Andrey Demin reported that over 100 Bayraktar drones had been destroyed in fighting in Ukraine.
“There are practically no fundamental distinctions between fighting against strategic drones like the US Global Hawk (RQ-4) or Reaper (MQ-9) or Turkiye’s operational-tactical Bayraktar-TB and counteraction to crewed aircraft. The elimination of more than 100 Bayraktars, delivered to Ukraine throughout the period of the special military operation, is clear evidence of this,” Demin said, speaking with Russia’s official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.
For the battle against large drones, including their detection and destruction, the same monitoring and strike systems as those used against traditional aircraft can be used. This has been demonstrated not only in Ukraine, but with the June 2019 shootdown over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz of a $220 million Global Hawk operated by the US Navy by an Iranian road-mobile air defense system known as the 3rd Khordad.
How Can Electronic Countermeasures Be Used to Destroy Drones?
Smaller drones, including so-called mini and micro UAVs, are more difficult to detect, Demin admitted, pointing to these weapons’ “small effective reflective surface” for radar detection, and saying that tracking such systems and revealing their trajectory using standard radar equipment is “rather problematic.”
For this purpose, the Russian military has developed an air defense system of a different sort – the RLK-MTs Valdai, a special-purpose radar designed specifically to detect, suppress, and neutralize small drones with extremely low radar cross sections.
Developed by Almaz-Antey, manufacturer of the Buk and S-300/S-400/S-500 series of air and missile defense systems, the RLK-MTs is a vehicle-mounted radar complex designed to detect enemy drones at distances of up to 15 km, and to take them down using electronic countermeasures (using a control and navigation signal suppression module) at close-in ranges of 2 km or less. The complex’s detection systems include an X-band radar module, thermal imagers and cameras, a radio signal source-finder module. The vehicles can be operated remotely.
Demin confirmed that the RLK-MTs is “already performing combat missions to cover critical military and state facilities, including those in the special military operation zone,” and said he expects production of the systems to ramp up dramatically in the coming years.
Large, vehicle-based systems stuffed with detection systems and powerful electronic countermeasures are arguably the most capable defenses against small drones, but certainly aren’t the only ones. Smaller systems, ranging from commercial and industrial anti-drone monitoring and suppression hardware, to military-grade man-portable anti-drone rifles have been created by several Russian manufacturers. These weapons include the PARS-S Stepashka – a 9.6 kg anti-drone gun with the capability to hijack enemy drones and force them to land or return to their launch sites. The system is effective at ranges between 500 meters and 1.5 km.
Other, similar portable anti-drone systems have been spotted in footage from the battlefield, including the Stupor electromagnetic rifle – which uses electromagnetic pulses to suppress drones’ control channels and force them down.
How Can Lasers Fight Drones?
Advances in laser pulse weaponry have enhanced prospects for their use in modern warfare. Last year, Yuri Borisov – the former Russian deputy prime minister responsible for defense and the space industry since appointed boss of Roscosmos, revealed that the Russian military has tested a mystery combat laser system known as the Zadira that’s capable of incinerating drones in seconds at distances of up to 5 km in Ukraine. Its development began in 2016 under the auspices of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, a subsidiary of Rosatom.
The Zadira is not to be confused with the Peresvet – a strategic laser weapon designed to target an enemy up to 1,500 km in orbit over the planet. That system entered combat duty on a test basis in December 2018, but has not been used in Ukraine.
Russia is not the only country tinkering with the use of laser weapons for anti-drone warfare, with the United States and Israel also working on such weapons.
Lasers have several clear advantages over conventional air defense missiles – including their low cost (Israeli officials have boasted, for example, that the new Iron Beam laser-based air defense system uses just $2-worth of electricity – 10,000-50,000 times less than conventional Iron Dome missiles). But lasers also have a number of drawbacks, including the need to secure large amounts of electricity (limiting their mobility), plus problems operating in certain weather conditions, including fog and cloud cover).
Can Drones Be Used to Counter Other Drones?
Last but not least in the list of portable anti-drone defenses are other UAVs. Systems like the ZALA Lancet multipurpose loitering munition/kamikaze drone are capable of targeting enemy UAVs, with its developers creating a concept which they’ve dubbed “air mining” involving the deployment of large numbers of Lancets in an area of the front to protect against incursions by heavy attack drones. As an enemy drones approach, the Lancet locks on to the enemy target and dives onto it at high speeds to force it from the skies.
How Successful Has Russia’s Anti-Drone War Been?
Since Russia entered the Ukraine crisis, it has made many of the difficult but necessary changes to supply the Army with the equipment it needs for effective drone warfare.
Last week, an unclassified intelligence assessment by Britain’s Ministry of Defense concluded that Russia’s military had successfully integrated drone reconnaissance into operations involving long-range missile strikes in the Ukrainian hinterland. Also last week, a separate report by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute calculated that Russia has been using electronic warfare capabilities to destroy upwards of 10,000 Ukrainian drones per month. According to the assessment, Russia maintains “a major electronic warfare system roughly every 6 miles (9.6 km)” along the entire 1,200 km front line.
These assessments echo complaints by an insider at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, who told one Western outlet in March that Russian forces had obtained “black magic” capabilities against Ukraine’s vast arsenal of NATO-supplied drones, including the ability to “jam frequencies, spoof GPS, [and] send a drone to the wrong altitude so that it simply drops out of the sky.”
Fake Scientific Studies by Nobel Prize Winner and Johns Hopkins Prof. Gregg Semenza
BY IGOR CHUDOV | MAY 28, 2023
Gregg Semenza, a pediatrician and a professor of Genetic Science, is a prominent researcher. Prof. Semenza works at Johns Hopkins University, a premier scientific institution so important that it received $1,050,368,895 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (JHU played the most prominent role in the Covid pandemic response.)
Prof. Semenza made major discoveries regarding how cells adapt to oxygen availability. Those findings could potentially lead to curing cancer! So important was his work that he was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine in 2019.
There was a small problem, however.
Seven of his studies were fake and were eventually retracted. Retraction Watch has the details. Even the pictures of mice used in the studies were photoshopped:
The authors have retracted this article as multiple image irregularities have been noted within this article, specifically: Figure 1A, upper panel (HIF-1a blot), lanes five and seven appear to be duplicates. Figure 6B, lower panel (b-actin blot), the first six lanes appear to be identical to Fig. 6G, lower panel (b-actin blot). Figure 3G, the image of the third mouse in the D10 Saline group is identical to the image of the third mouse in the D21 Digoxin group.
Here’s one retracted article and the retraction notice. I downloaded the image from that study and highlighted the mouse in question, which appears in two pictures but with different scan results.
The authors copied/pasted the mouse picture and overlaid different scan results on the two copies. So, they did not have the scientific measurements they claimed to have!
Other retractions expose similarly ridiculous scientific fraud, including fake Western blots and more.
This fraud was not perpetrated by an obscure researcher languishing at a third-rate institution. Quite to the contrary, Prof. Semenza is a world-renowned scientist, occupying a position at a premier facility favored by the major funder of science, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Prof. Semenza shares the honor of receiving a Nobel prize with other famed recipients, such as Barack Obama, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and António Egas Moniz, inventor of lobotomy and the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Antonio Moniz, Inventor of Lobotomy
So, the world of Nobel prizes is very special!
In consolation, we at least know about this fraud, and Semenza’s articles in question were properly retracted. So the self-correcting scientific process worked as intended, at last.
Sadly, as we know, retractions do not always work in an evidence-based, scientific way. For example, many honest articles questioning Covid vaccines or masks were retracted under pressure from science funders.
I feel that my trust in scientists has been violated by “COVID science” and certain other new scientific developments, but I still like the science of the good kind. I have much less faith in Nobel Prizes, however.
GOP Lawmakers Demand FBI Briefing on Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Investigation Following Whistleblower Disclosures
By Debra Heine | American Greatness | May 25, 2023
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding an FBI briefing on the status of their January 6 Pipe Bomb Investigation following disclosures that the feds have enough information to identify a suspect.
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) said the slow progression of the Bureau’s investigation into the pipe bombs “raises significant concerns about the FBI’s prioritization of that case in relation to other January 6 investigations.”
Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, a whistleblower who worked on the pipe bomb investigation, told the Washington Times that after planting the bombs, the suspect used a MetroRail SmarTrip card to travel through the Washington metro system to a stop in northern Virginia.
“The FBI used security footage in the Northern Virginia to identify the license plate of the car that the individual entered,” the congressmen wrote. “Still, the FBI has not identified the subject.”
The suspect was caught on surveillance video. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, a pair of Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow Nike logo, a backpack and gloves. He was recorded walking through Capitol Hill neighborhoods carrying what federal investigators said were two live pipe bombs.
However, Mr. Seraphin said technicians determined the pipe bombs were inoperable.
His story runs counter to the FBI’s official version that the devices could have detonated at any time. The bureau repeated that story in January while offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest.
Seraphin also told Times reporter Kerry Picket that a separate individual bought the Metrorail SmarTrip card one year before the pipe bomber suspect used it on Jan. 5, 2021.
“The card had never been used before. It was bought a year prior by a retired chief master sergeant in the Air Force, and he was a security contractor. So he held a security clearance,” Seraphin said.
Mr. Seraphin and his team surveilled the retired airman, who lived in a Northern Virginia townhouse, for a couple of days and learned about his background.
Although Mr. Seraphin, who also served in the Air Force, wanted to approach the Air Force veteran and talk to him, his bureau superiors forbade him to do so before his team was removed from the case.
“I don’t know what they [eventually] did on that case, but I know that it was BS and the bombs were BS, and it seems like they had a good lead, and they could have run it down. But as far as I know, they never did,” he told the Times. “He may still be occasionally surveilled. That’s how dumb it gets.”
The congressmen cited former FBI assistant director Christopher Swecker, who told Picket, “[i]t just doesn’t add up . . . [t]here’s just too much to work with to not know who this guy is.”
The committee requested an update on the case in a briefing no later that June 7, 2023.
Spiegel, after running multiple stories blaming the Nord Stream attack on “Russian ships”, reverses course
Points the finger once again at Ukraine
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | May 28, 2023
Der Spiegel, after running multiple stories peddling the canard that mysterious “Russian ships” were implicated in the Nord Stream attacks of 26 September 2022, has in a familiar pattern now totally reversed course and declared instead that there is increasing evidence pointing to Ukrainian attackers. They report that the theory of a Russian “false-flag operation,” to which they’ve given so much attention, is in fact “considered extremely unlikely” by “those familiar with the case.” The key evidence is unspecified “email metadata” from the mysterious parties who rented the Andromeda.
The investigators of the Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank … are now certain that the sailing yacht “Andromeda” was used for the attack. She sailed from Rostock-Warnemünde in early September 2022 and returned after the attacks. Forged identity documents were apparently used for her charter.
Remains of an underwater explosive were found across a large area of the cabin of the “Andromeda.” It is said to be octogen, an explosive widely used both in the West and in the former Eastern Bloc. …
Octogen is much lighter than TNT, capable of transport in a relatively small boat. Experienced combat divers could have placed it at the site of the attack on the bottom of the Baltic. The often-heard argument, that the weight of the explosives would have required a larger ship and perhaps a miniature submarine, is therefore no longer convincing.
The traces found by the Federal Criminal Police Office align with the assessments of several intelligence services, according to which the perpetrators hail from the Ukraine. Intelligence services have also asked whether the attack could have been carried out by an uncontrolled commando, or by Ukrainian intelligence services – and to what extent elements of the Ukrainian state apparatus may have been implicated. ,,,
Even before the attacks, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) received a warning from the American CIA that were indications Ukrainian perpetrators were planning an attack on the pipelines. The BND did not, however, consider the reports to be very credible.
The story, picked up within hours by multiple German press outlets, follows slightly earlier reporting from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and German state media broadcasters WDR and NDR that likewise claims to have evidence of Ukrainian complicity, though the details of these earlier reports are so murky and unclear, I decided it was better to ignore them at the time. Allegedly, these news organisations discovered that the entity which rented the Andromeda is a shell company masquerading as a travel agency registered in Poland. The unnamed president of this unnamed company lives in Kiev; her name is also on the paperwork of various other companies, and so it seems likely she’s merely a frontman who has no specific involvement with the firm.
The same journalists also reported that, among the forged passports used to rent the Andromeda, was a Romanian document in the name of a certain “Stefan M.”
A person with this name and date of birth appears actually to exist, but according to the findings of the BKA [the German Federal Criminal Police Office], he was likely in Romania at the time of the explosions. But who was the man who presented the passport in the Baltic? According to research by WDR, NDR, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and their media partners, German investigators believe it could be a Ukrainian national – a man in his mid-20s from a town southeast of Kiev …
Social media photos show a young man, often smiling, sometimes in military uniform with a helmet – and with conspicuous tattoos. The young Ukrainian is said to have previously served in an infantry unit. Investigators are apparently following up on other names and clues. Only one of the young man’s relatives can be reached on the phone: she says he is currently serving in the military. … So far, official Ukrainian agencies have not responded to enquiries.
So, to sum up: One of the emails sent to rent the Andromeda came from Ukraine; the shell company that rented the Andromeda is registered under the name of an unrelated Polish woman living in Kiev; and one of the forged passports presented in this transaction carried a photo that might be of a Ukrainian soldier.
The duelling narratives here are clearly more significant than the specific facts (or, “facts”) which they relate. As I noted in my last Nord Stream update, the Russian-ships theory of the attack has been put about by some source within NATO and laundered through OSINT propagandists, and it looks for all the world like an implicit attack on Hersh’s story, for it centres on the alleged movements of the SS-750, a Russian ship outfitted with a miniature submarine designed for underwater rescue operations. The subtext is that the divers of Hersh’s scenario could never have done the job.
The Andromeda story, meanwhile, hails from intelligence services, specifically the CIA and (probably at second-hand) the German BND, whence it flowed to German criminal investigators and the press. This scenario is framed as an explicit attack on the Russian-ships theory, which the anonymous Spiegel informants go out of their way to discredit. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that the Russia-did-it line has overtly escalatory potential, for it posits a Russian attack in Swedish and Danish waters on energy infrastructure that, in the case of Nord Stream 1, is even partly owned by Germany. The Andromeda story generally strives to make room for a non-state actor, thus removing the immediate diplomatic significance of the attacks. This would explain the bizarre and thinly veiled suggestion of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, back in March, that former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko may have been involved in orchestrating the explosions, because they took place on his birthday.
Once again, it remains an enduring mystery, why none of the major published scenarios – not even Seymour Hersh’s detailed account of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline – accounts for the specifics of the sabotage, which featured two sets of explosions at two separate locations, exactly 17 hours apart. John Mearsheimer recently remarked that if he “had to bet,” he’d “bet that the United States destroyed Nord Stream,” because such an action would be “completely consistent with what America’s overall policy is towards Russia.” It’s very easy to imagine that the United States would have orchestrated the attack through proxies, and it’s at least worth asking whether Hersh’s source fed him an incomplete account for the purposes of obfuscating Ukrainian involvement. On the other hand, the Andromeda theory is very hard to believe; if it is an intelligence service “cover story,” as Hersh claims, we must ask why it is so implausible.
The USAF Chief Said That F-16s Won’t Be A Game-Changer For Kiev So Why’s The Kremlin So Upset?
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 28, 2023
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko recently warned that the West’s possible shipment of F-16s to Kiev “is fraught with colossal risks” for that de facto New Cold War bloc, shortly after which his boss Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described this scenario as “an unacceptable escalation.” The Kremlin’s assessment clashes with the Pentagon’s, whose Air Force chief Frank Kendall claimed last week that “it’s not going to be a dramatic game-changer…for their total military capabilities.”
Biden’s support at the G7 Summit for training Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16s and some countries’ like the UK’s plans to assemble a so-called “jet coalition” for their Eastern European proxy suggest that these opposite predictions will be put to the test after some time unless a ceasefire is reached first. Considering this possibility, it’s timely to weigh the merits of each side’s assessment in order to get a better idea of whether the Kremlin’s or the Pentagon’s will more closely reflect reality in that scenario.
Sky News’ explainer that was published on Sunday provides a good starting point for answering this question. According to military analyst Sean Bell, Kiev will likely receive old F-16s that are “heavily dependent on spares” and urgently in need of being updated with modern equipment. “Anything less” than “Modern air-to-air missiles married to a modern F-16 radar”, which he said “would pose a credible threat”, “risks emboldening the Russian Air Force.”
Before reaching his conclusion, Bell also informed readers that “In addition to radar, modern fighters also need state-of-the-art electronic warfare, defensive aids, infrared sensors, link-16 datalinks, and a computer system to programme and deliver the latest generation of high-tech air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons”, not to mention “trained pilots and groundcrew, weapons, spares, ground planning facilities, intelligence, and a suite of supporting infrastructure are also required.”
Quite clearly, it’ll be an herculean task for the West to make Kiev’s possible F-16 fleet a formidable challenge for Russia’s much more modern one that’s already manned by very experienced pilots. This take therefore extends credence to Kendall’s claim that it won’t be a game-changer. Nevertheless, Kiev reportedly envisages arming the F-16s with Swedish-German Taurus missiles that could reach Moscow with their 500-kilometer maximum range, though it’s unclear whether they’ll receive them.
Even if they do, then this doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to break through Russia’s air defenses. Should they succeed in striking targets near or within that Great Power’s capital, however, then it would certainly be spun by them and their supporters as a soft power coup. This is especially the case if verified footage emerges of an F-16 taking down a much more modern Russian jet. Both scenarios are unlikely, though, but their political significance partially explains why Kiev wants these planes so badly.
The other motivation behind obtaining these systems is for them “to strike the command centers and logistical networks of the Russian forces” in the former Ukrainian regions that Kiev claims as its own according to their Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat. While it’s obviously better for them to have more capabilities available than less, this use of the F-16s also wouldn’t be a game-changer and could even be counterproductive for the West’s soft power if Russia ends up shooting them down.
On the other hand, there are still plausible reasons for why the Kremlin would regard the West’s transfer of these planes to Ukraine as an unacceptable escalation. For starters, it represents yet another unilateral escalation by NATO in its proxy war with Russia, which could prompt Moscow to respond in ways that risk bringing the conflict closer to nuclear brinksmanship. The Kremlin might feel forced to react more seriously than usual in order to “save face” after yet another of its “red lines” was crossed.
The US is basically taunting Russia to do so at this point per an interpretation of Politico’s recent report. According to their unnamed administration sources, “The Pentagon, including top military officials, have long worried about the potential of escalation on the Russian side should the West take such a step as giving Ukraine F-16 capabilities. But Blinken had observed over the past year that Russia rarely escalates beyond rhetoric, even as the West has introduced more military offerings into Ukraine.”
Russian policymakers might therefore calculate that they finally have to do something meaningful to signal their displeasure if this latest “red line” is crossed, particularly if Moscow gets bombed by the F-16s and/or verified footage emerges of them taking down one of their jets. The odds of that happening would spike if a few of those planes are secretly modernized. In that case, Russia risks becoming a laughingstock if nothing serious is done in response, after which even more escalations might follow.
Other than possibly being placed in this particular dilemma, there’s another reason why the Kremlin considers the West’s potential transfer of these planes to Ukraine to be unacceptable, and that’s the chance that they could be based in NATO states and/or manned by “volunteer pilots” from NATO. The first scenario would already be provocative enough, but could prompt an unprecedented crisis if those NATO-based F-16s are used to bomb Russia’s pre-2014 territory.
As for the second, it would almost certainly entail the most modern F-16s being used since NATO likely wouldn’t risk its “volunteer pilots’” lives by having them fly outdated deathtraps. Furthermore, these planes would then probably be based in a NATO state for additional protection even if they’re only used to hit targets over the airspace or in the territory that Kiev claims as its own. As with the first scenario, that would already be a major provocation, let alone if they’re used to bomb Russia’s pre-2014 territory.
To be absolutely clear, there’s nothing credible in the public domain to suggest that these last two worst-case scenarios are being contemplated, but it’s likely the Kremlin’s concerns that the West’s possible transfer of F-16s to Ukraine could lead to those escalations that it considers this unacceptable. Russian policymakers probably expect that any reluctance to meaningfully signal their displeasure at the crossing of that latest “red line” would embolden the West to eventually think about doing precisely that in time.
They obviously don’t want to be placed in the dilemma whereby they might feel damned if they express such a signal by escalating in response for deterrence purposes and equally damned if they decline. In either case, the consequences are unpredictable and could result in everything spiraling out of control, hence why they prefer for Kiev not to obtain any F-16s in the first place. Nobody can therefore say with certainty what will ultimately happen, which is why many observers are becoming worried about this.
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Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alam offers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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