THE WEST PROMOTES CHEM WAR FEARS

The chemical weapons at Vladimir Putin’s disposal and how Russia’s track record spells grim omen for Ukraine

The Kremlin has shown itself ready to use nerve agents on foreign soil, including on the streets of Salisbury in 2018

Emergency workers in protective suits in the aftermath of the Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury in 2018 (Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty)

By Cahal Milmo

March 11, 2022 

A key reason for the decision by the White House to issue its chilling warning that the Kremlin could be planning a chemical or biological weapon attack in Ukraine is that Russia has both the means and a record for doing so.

At the end of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union had one of the world’s largest stocks of chemical weapons, including nerve agents, and was known to be running the world’s largest and most advanced biological warfare programme, at one point employing nearly 70,000 people.

Both the production and use of biological and chemical weapons are banned under international treaties to which Russia is a signatory.

But despite such solemn geo-political undertakings, the Kremlin has in recent years shown itself ready to deploy chemical weapons in the shape of the so-called “Novichok” nerve agents used on the streets of Salisbury in 2018 and against Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny two years later.

It is also believed that when it comes to the even more terrifying pursuit of biological weapons – the use of viruses, bacteria such as Anthrax and other pathogens to effectively harness disease as a tool of war – Moscow remains unashamedly active.

The US State Department last year formally declared that in its assessment “Russia maintains an offensive [biological weapons] programme” and is in violation of the treaty banning their development, production or use.

The exact nature and quantity of what Russia holds in the chemical and biological weaponry sphere is hard to quantify.

According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body with oversees the global ban, Russia is one of eight countries around the world which between them continued to hold some 72,300 tons of the most potent chemical toxins after the ban was put in place in 1997.

The OPCW said the Russian share of those weapons was certified as having been destroyed in 2017 but Washington and its allies say they do not believe Moscow made a full declaration of its weaponry stocks.

It is certainly clear that it has considerable manufacturing capability when it comes to nerve agents – the perfume bottle containing Novichok used to target Russian MI6 agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia held enough poison to deliver a potentially lethal dose to 10,000 people.

The vast majority of any remaining Russian chemical weapons stockpile is thought to be made up of nerve agents, including VX, a substance so deadly that just 0.4mg can kill an adult. It is believed its chemical arsenal also includes limited quantities of blistering agents such as mustard gas.

Western experts say the precise nature of the Kremlin’s biological weaponry research, believed to be carried out in a Soviet-era facility in the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, is unknown.

The question remains of how Russia might carry out the type of chemical or biological weapons atrocity of which Washington warns may be under consideration in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s propagandists.

A heavy clue lies in the wreckage of Syria, where Russia successfully conducted a brutal campaign to bolster the regime of Bashar Al Assad.

According to one authoritative study, the Syrian dictator’s armed forces carried out the majority of 85 chemical weapons attacks during the country’s decade-long civil war, including the notorious Sarin nerve gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta which may have killed as many as 1,700 people.

One former military specialist said: “The Kremlin refined its tactics for this sort of scenario by watching – and standing alongside – Assad’s forces as they did their worst. The Syrians would routinely blame jihadist groups whenever there was a chemical attack.

“You can already see Putin trying to prepare the ground for a false flag attack by blaming the Ukrainians or Americans and retaliating. We should be in no doubt that chemical weapons form part of the Kremlin’s thinking.”

It is for this reason that Washington, and other Western capitals, have been aggressive in their denials of a steady drip of spurious claims from Moscow that Ukraine has smuggled noxious chemicals into the east of the country or that America had set up research laboratories in Ukraine.

As Ned Price, the US State Department’s official spokesman, put it: “There are no US chemical or biological weapons labs in Ukraine. However, Russia has a long and well-documented record of using chemical weapons against opposition leaders and innocent civilians.” 

READ MORE: Concerns grow Russia may use chemical weapons

READ MORE: British PM fears Russia may use chemical weapons

Ukraine war: 'You know' we don't have chemical weapons, Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells Russia

The suggestion that Ukraine is developing weapons of mass destruction is rubbished by the president, who says: "We are a decent country."

Ukraine war: 'You know' we don't have chemical weapons, Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells Russia | World News | Sky News

RUSSIA PROMOTES FAKE BIO WAR

WHO says it advised Ukraine to destroy pathogens in health labs

WHO tells Reuters it advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent disease spread.

Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting animals and humans including, most recently, COVID-19 [File: Hannah Beier/ Reuters]

Published On 11 Mar 2022

The World Health Organization (WHO) advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in the country’s public health laboratories to prevent “any potential spills” that would spread disease among the population, the agency told the Reuters news agency.

Biosecurity experts say Russia’s movement of troops into Ukraine and bombardment of its cities have raised the risk of an escape of disease-causing pathogens, should any of those facilities be damaged.

Like many other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting animals and humans including, most recently, COVID-19.

Its labs have received support from the United States, the European Union and the WHO.

In response to questions from Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia’s invasion, the WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent “accidental or deliberate release of pathogens”.

“As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills,” the WHO, a United Nations agency, said.

The WHO would not say when it had made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine’s laboratories.

The agency also did not answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed.

Ukrainian officials in Kyiv and at their embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Ukraine’s laboratory capabilities are at the centre of a growing information war since Russia began moving troops into Ukraine two weeks ago.

On Wednesday, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova repeated a longstanding claim that the United States operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv.

Zakharova said that documents unearthed by Russian forces in Ukraine showed “an emergency attempt to erase evidence of military biological programmes” by destroying lab samples.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm her information.

In response, a Ukrainian presidential spokesperson said: “Ukraine strictly denies any such allegation.”

US government spokespeople also strongly denied Zakharova’s accusations, saying that Russia may use its claims as a pretext to deploy its own chemical or biological weapons.

The WHO statement made no reference to biowarfare.

The agency said it encourages all parties to cooperate in “the safe and secure disposal of any pathogens they come across, and to reach out for technical assistance as needed”.

It offered to help wherever possible with technical guidance and coordination.

The United Nations Security Council will convene on Friday at Russia’s request, diplomats said, to discuss Moscow’s claims, presented without evidence, of US biological activities in Ukraine.

SOURCE: REUTERS

WHO urges Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent ‘potential spills’ from bombed labs


Bombardment of Ukrainian cities could increase risk of disease spread if public health labs are damaged

Shweta Sharma

THE INDEPENDENT

March 11, 2022 


Psaki accuses Russia of telling 'outright lies' about US bioweapons labs in Ukraine

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has advised Ukraine to destroy “disease-causing pathogens” housed in the country’s public health labs at the risk of spilling and spreading diseases if bombed, as the Russian invasion of the country continued.

The UN health agency told Reuters on Thursday that there was a risk of disease spreading among the population if “high-threat” pathogens were not destroyed to prevent “any potential spills”.

The WHO did not provide details about what kind of pathogens or toxins could be inside Ukraine’s laboratories.

Pathogens are disease-causing microbes.

Biosecurity experts have said the bombardment of Ukrainian cities and troop movement has raised the risk of the escape of disease if such labs are damaged.

Ukraine’s public health labs were involved in research work on how to mitigate the threat of dangerous diseases, including Covid-19, like many other countries.

The country’s labs have received support from the US, the European Union and the WHO, the report said.

WHO said it has been collaborating with the country’s public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent “accidental or deliberate release of pathogens”.


“As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills,” the global health agency said.

This map shows the extent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
(Press Association Images)

The agency’s remarks come as Russia has accused Ukraine, without providing any evidence, of secretly operating chemical and biological weapons laboratories at the behest of the US.

In a tweet, the Russian embassy in London repeated a longstanding claim that cited “recently found documents” that it said showed components of biological weapons were made in Ukraine’s labs with the help of the US Department of Defence.

At the same time, Russian media and right-wing news outlets have promoted the theories and also mischaracterised testimony given to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday by Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland regarding “biological research facilities” in Ukraine.

The US promptly dismissed the claims that emerged from Russia, calling them “laughable” and warned the country was laying the groundwork for using chemical or biological weapons against Ukraine.

“The Russian accusations are absurd, they are laughable and you know, in the words of my Irish Catholic grandfather, a bunch of malarkey. There’s nothing to it. It’s classic Russian propaganda,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday.

A Ukrainian presidential spokesperson has also said the country “strictly denies any such allegation”.

Meanwhile, the WHO made no reference to biowarfare. It said it encourages all parties to cooperate in “the safe and secure disposal of any pathogens they come across and to reach out for technical assistance as needed.”

It offered to help with technical guidance and coordination to the countries and Ukraine.

UN Security Council to Meet Friday on Biological Weapons, at Moscow's Request

March 11, 2022 
Agence France-Presse

The U.N. Security Council meets to discuss the situation between Russia and Ukraine, at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, New York City, Jan. 31, 2022.

UNITED NATIONS —

The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Friday on alleged manufacture of biological weapons in Ukraine at the request of Moscow, whose credibility on chemical weapons was questioned during a session on Syria.

Russia on Thursday accused the United States of funding research into the development of biological weapons in Ukraine, which has faced an assault by tens of thousands of Russian troops since Feb. 24.

Both Washington and Kyiv have denied the allegations, with the United States saying they were a sign that Moscow could soon use the weapons itself.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Russia's allegations in a video address on Thursday, saying, "No one is developing any chemical or any other weapons of mass destruction" in Ukraine.

Western states have charged that Russia is employing a ruse by accusing their opponents and the United states of developing biological and chemical weapons to lay the ground for their possible use in Ukraine -- something Moscow has been accused of doing in Syria.

At a monthly Security Council meeting on the use of chemical weapons in Syria -- a case that remains unresolved and continues to suffer from a U.N.-denounced lack of information from Damascus -- both Washington and London raised Ukraine.

"The Russian Federation has repeatedly spread disinformation regarding Syria's repeated use of chemical weapons," the deputy U.S. envoy to the U.N., Richard Mills, said.

"The recent web of lies that Russia has cast in an attempt to justify the premeditated and unjustified war it has undertaken against Ukraine, should make clear, once and for all, that Russia also cannot be trusted when it talks about chemical weapon use in Syria."

Mills' U.K. counterpart, James Kariuki, denounced Moscow's attack on Ukraine and said the "parallels with Russian action in Syria are clear."

"Regrettably, the comparison also extends to chemical weapons, as we see the familiar specter of Russian chemical weapons disinformation raising its head in Ukraine."

In 2018, Moscow accused the United States of secretly conducting biological weapons experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic that, like Ukraine, has ambitions to join NATO and the European Union.

The Security Council meeting Friday is slated to begin at 11 a.m. (1600 GMT).

GMO IS OMG BACKWARDS

Billions Of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Permitted For Release in California And Florida

THE AEDES AEGYPTI MOSQUITO IS A PROMINENT VECTOR FOR SEVERAL HUMAN DISEASES INCLUDING DENGUE, CHIKUNGUNYA, ZIKA, YELLOW FEVER, AND MORE. IMAGE CREDIT: FRANK60/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

By Tom Hale

10 MAR 2022


The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has given the go-ahead for biotech company Oxitec to release billions of genetically engineered mosquitoes in Florida and California, with a mission to combat mosquito-borne diseases like Dengue fever and the Zika virus.

After passing a risk assessment, Oxitec's technology was given an experimental use permit allowing 2.4 billion gene-tweaked mosquitos – over 2 billion in California and just under 400 million in Florida – to be released in two separate periods between 2022 to 2024.

This recent permit comes off the back of a pilot project in the Florida Keys successfully carried out in 2021. Now the project has received the EPA permit, applications can be sent to local state regulators to mull over.

The plan is to release billions of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which don’t bite, genetically modified to express the protein tTAV-OX5034. The Aedes aegypti mosquito is not native to California or Florida, but it’s become a prominent vector for several human diseases including Dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever.

Once the introduced males mate with wild female mosquitoes, the protein will be passed on and effectively kill female offspring before they reach maturity, thereby reducing the local population of mosquitos and quashing disease transmission (at least in theory).

While the mosquitos and Oxitec’s technology have undergone dozens of tests and trials, not everyone likes the prospect of releasing swarms of genetically engineered bugs into the wild. Previous pilot trials have received some resistance from concerned locals, with some critics calling it a “Jurassic Park experiment.”

One source of controversy was a 2019 paper studying Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes in Brazil, concluding that the project didn’t work as intended as many mosquitoes were surviving into adulthood and potentially deepening the area's mosquito problem. However, the journal’s editors then issued an Editorial Expression of Concern for the study, noting that a number of concerns had been raised with the research.

News of releasing the genetically modified mosquitoes in California is also causing some heads to turn.

“Once released into the environment, genetically engineered mosquitoes cannot be recalled,” Dr Robert Gould, President of San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility, said in a statement released by Friends of the Earth. “Rather than forge ahead with an unregulated open-air genetic experiment, we need precautionary action, transparent data and appropriate risk assessments.”

“This experiment is unnecessary and even dangerous, as there are no locally acquired cases of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya or Zika in California,” added Jaydee Hanson, Policy Director for the International Center for Technology Assessment and Center for Food Safety

Oxitec has tried to quell these concerns from the public, maintaining that their mosquitos offer a safe and sustainable pest control technology that does not harm beneficial insects, such as bees and butterflies. Nevertheless, the controversy is unlikely to die down anytime soon.

“Given the growing health threat this mosquito poses across the U.S., we’re working to make this technology available and accessible. These pilot programs, wherein we can demonstrate the technology’s effectiveness in different climate settings, will play an important role in doing so. We look forward to getting to work this year,” Grey Frandsen, CEO of Oxitec, said in a statement.

UPDATE
Scientists Investigate 300-Year-Old Mummified "Mermaid" Said To Be Caught In The 1700s




ANOTHER SIMILAR 'MERMAID'. 

IMAGE CREDIT: THOM ATKINSON/WELLCOME IMAGES (CC BY 4.0)

By James Felton09 MAR 2022, 17:11

A team of researchers have started their project to analyze a "mermaid mummy" – a strange-looking creature (or creatures) said to be caught in a fishing net off the coast of present-day Kochi Prefecture, Japan, between 1736 and 1741.

Since its discovery (or, if you're a little more healthily skeptical, since someone sewed a fish to a monkey) the "mermaid" has been kept at the Enjuin temple in Asakuchi, where it has been seen as an object of worship.

“We have worshipped it, hoping that it would help alleviate the coronavirus pandemic even if only slightly,” the head priest told Japanese news outlet Asahi. “I hope the research project can leave (scientific) records for future generations.”

Now, Asahi reports, it is to be studied scientifically for the first time. Researchers from the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts have so far removed the mummy from the temple in order to place it on a CT scanner.

The team will also test DNA samples taken from the mummy, to ascertain what animals have been used to create it – it is believed to be a monkey and a fish. Previous studies have looked at similar animals, including one "mermaid" that turned out to be a fish that was attached to a wire and wood torso, with human hair for a finishing touch.

Perhaps the most famous mermaid hoax was the "Fiji Mermaid", put on display by P. T. Barnum. Barnum advertised the exhibit with drawings of typical mythical mermaids: Beautiful creatures with the head and body of a woman (depicted as naked in the leaflets) attached to the bottom half of a fish. What actually greeted punters when they showed up to see the mermaid was the top half of a monkey, which had been sewn to a fish, and both parts were also extremely dead.

The mermaid was likely created by a Japanese fisherman as a joke. The fisherman claimed the monkey-fish had made a prophecy that everyone on the island would become sterile, and the only cure was to have a picture of the mermaid itself, which handily he could allow for a small fee.

The team will publish their findings on the "mermaid" later this year, though don't hold your breath for confirmation that mermaids are real. According to Hiroshi Kinoshita of the Okayama Folklore Society who first sparked this latest project, another "mermaid" specimen turned out to be a monkey stitched to a salmon.

"You Look Ridiculous" Scientists Tell Big-Nosed Bat Upon Rediscovery After 40-Year Hiatus


“THE FACIAL FEATURES WERE EXAGGERATED TO THE POINT OF COMICAL.' 

IMAGE CREDIT: JON FLANDERS, BAT CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL


By Rachael Funnell

10 MAR 2022

A critically endangered “lost species” came crashing back into existence in the Nyungwe Forest National Park in Rwanda recently, as the Hill’s horseshoe bat was rediscovered in the net of a team of conservationists marking its first appearance in 40 years.

“When we caught it, we all just looked at it and said, ‘You look ridiculous. Look how big your nose leaf is,’” Dr Jon Flanders, director of endangered species interventions at Bat Conservation International, told Mongabay. Quite the welcome party.

Behind the comical discovery was a multi-national team of experts led by Bat Conservation International (BCI), Rwanda Development Board (RDB), and the Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association (RWCA). Surveys had been conducted since 2013 but it was on a fateful night in January 2019 that the rediscovery occurred.

With a sizable schnozz, the Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hillorum) certainly made an impression.

“We knew immediately that the bat we had captured was unusual and remarkable,” said BCI Chief Scientist Dr Winifred Frick in a statement.

“The facial features were exaggerated to the point of comical. Horseshoe bats are easily distinguishable from other bats by characteristic horseshoe shape and specialized skin flaps on their noses.”

Known as a nose leaf, the voluminous bit of kit on the Hill’s horseshoe’s nose is an adaptation that is thought to help certain bats who echolocate nasally in shaping and modifying their calls.

Rare bat in hand, the team carefully took measurements and made the first-ever echolocation recording for the Hill’s horseshoe bat before letting the big-nosed star of the show fly free again.

The world-first recordings are a particular win for the conservation of the species, as the Nyungwe Park Rangers have since been able to set up detectors to eavesdrop on any Hill’s horseshoe bat conversations. Sneaky.

When they caught the bat, its size and the sheer volume of its nose pointed towards the likely species. To be sure, Flanders later took a trip to museum archives in Europe to compare against the only known Hill’s horseshoe bat specimens in the world to confirm.

“Going into this project we feared the species may have already gone extinct,” he said. “Rediscovering Hill’s horseshoe bat was incredible – it’s astonishing to think that we’re the first people to see this bat in so long.”

“Now our real work begins to figure out how to protect this species long into the future.”

Speaking of bats with wondrous faces, have you seen the built-in face masks of the wrinkle-faced bat (Centurio senex)? Or how about the unbeatable schnozz of the hammer-headed fruit bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus)?

Marx After Marx: Time, History and the Expansion

 

This book deprovincializes Marx and the West’s cultural turn by returning to the theorist’s earlier explanations of capital’s origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx’s expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital’s system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.

Marx After Marx: Time, History and the Expansion

Harry Harootunian
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress.

Marx After Marx: Time, History and the Expansion – The University Seminars (columbia.edu)

Ukraine: A conflict soaked in contradictions

There are wars in Africa and Asia and some are rarely commented on in the media, so why is Ukraine different?

By VIJAY PRASHAD

MARCH 3, 2022

A military vehicle drives along a road in Armyansk in the northern part of Crimea on February 24, 2022. Photo: Sputnik

Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That’s likely because although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways.

The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a US intervention. That in itself is a surprise – one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike.

Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of life in Ukraine resulting from the Russian intervention – and the neofascist violence in the Donbas – it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West’s ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they believe they share aspects of identity with – whether related to culture, religion or skin color.

White wars

War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a very fragile planet. Wars in Africa and Asia seem endless, and some of them are rarely commented upon with any feeling in media outlets across the world or in the cascade of posts found on social media platforms.

For example, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which started in 1996 and which has resulted in millions of casualties, has not elicited the kind of sympathy from the world now seen during the reporting on Ukraine.

In contrast, the startlingly frank comments from political leaders and journalists during the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the grip of racism on the imaginations of these shapers of public opinion.

It was impossible recently to get major global media outlets interested in the conflict in Cabo Delgado, which grew out of the capture of the bounty of natural gas by TotalEnergies SE (France) and ExxonMobil (US) and led to the deployment of the French-backed Rwandan military in Mozambique.

At COP26, I told a group of oil-company executives about this intervention, which I had covered for Globetrotter, and one of them responded with precise accuracy: “You’re right about what you say, but no one cares.”

No one, which is to say the political forces in the North Atlantic states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and Asia.

They are, however, gripped by the war in Ukraine, which should grip them, which distresses all of us, but which should not be allowed to be seen as worse than other conflicts taking place across the globe that are much more brutal and are likely to slip out of everyone’s memory because of the lack of interest and attention given by world leaders and media outlets to them.

Charlie D’Agata of CBS News said Kiev “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that … [a conflict] is going to happen.”

Clearly, these are the things one expects to see in Kabul (Afghanistan) or Baghdad (Iraq) or Goma (the Democratic Republic of Congo), but not in a “relatively civilized, relatively European” city in Ukraine. If these are things that one expects in the former cities respectively, then there is very little need to be particularly outraged by the violence that is witnessed in these cities.

You would not expect such violence in Ukraine, said the country’s deputy chief prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, to the British Broadcasting Corporation, because of the kind of people who were caught in the crossfire: “European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed every day.”

Sakvarelidze considers the Ukrainians to be Europeans, although D’Agata calls them “relatively European.” But they are certainly not African or Asian, people whom – if you think carefully about what is being said here – certain world leaders and international media outlets expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global great powers and by the weapons sold to the local thugs in these regions by these great powers.

Worst war?

On February 23, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in a heartfelt statement about the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, said: “In the name of humanity do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the century.”

The next day, on February 24, with Russia launching “the biggest attack on a European state since World War II,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned this “barbaric attack” and said “it is President Putin who is bringing war back to Europe.”

“Bringing war back to Europe”: this is instructive language from Von der Leyen. It reminded me of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), where the great poet and communist bemoaned Europe’s ability to forget the terrible fascistic treatment of the peoples of Africa and Asia by the colonial powers when they spoke of fascism.

Fascism, Césaire wrote, is the colonial experiment brought back to Europe.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, neither the United Nations secretary-general nor the president of the European Commission came forward to make any immediate condemnation of that war. Both international institutions went along with the war, allowing the destruction of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of more than one million people.

In 2004, a year into the US war on Iraq, after reports of grave violations of human rights (including by Amnesty International on torture in the prison of Abu Ghraib) came to light, the UN secretary-general, at the time, Kofi Annan, called the war “illegal.”

In 2006, three years after the war had started, then Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had been the president of the European Commission in 2003, called the war a “grave error.”

In the case of the Russian intervention, these institutions rushed to condemn the war, which is all very well; but does this mean they will be just as quick to condemn the United States when it starts its next bombing campaign?

War stenography

People often ask me what is the most reliable news outlet. This is a hard question to answer these days, as Western news outlets are increasingly becoming stenographers of their governments – with the racist attitudes of the reporters on full display more and more often, making the apologies that come later hardly comforting.

State-sponsored outlets in Russia and China now increasingly find themselves banned on social media sites. Anyone who counters Washington’s narrative is dismissed as irrelevant, and these fringe voices find it hard to develop an audience.

So-called cancel culture demonstrates its limits. D’Agata has apologized for his comment about Ukraine being “relatively civilized, relatively European” compared with Iraq and Afghanistan and has already been rehabilitated because he is on the “right side” of the conflict in Ukraine.

Cancel culture has moved from the chatter of social media to the battlefields of geopolitics and diplomacy as far as the Russian-Ukraine conflict is concerned.

Switzerland has decided to end a century of formal neutrality to cancel Russia by enforcing European sanctions against it – remember that Switzerland remained “neutral” as the Nazis tore through Europe during World War II, and operated as the Nazis’ bankers even after the war.

Meanwhile, press freedom has been set aside during the current conflict in Eastern Europe, with Australia and Europe suspending the broadcast of RT, which is a Russian state-controlled international media network.

D’Agata’s reliability as a reporter will remain unquestioned. He “misspoke,” they might say, but this is a Freudian slip.

Calculations of war

Wars are ugly, especially wars of aggression. The role of the reporter is to explain why a country goes to war, particularly an unprovoked war.

If this were 1941, I might try to explain the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II or the Japanese assumption that the Nazis would soon defeat the Soviets and then take the war across the Atlantic Ocean. But the Soviets held out, saving the world from fascism.

In the same way, the Russian attack on Ukraine requires explanation: The roots of it go deep to various political and foreign policy developments, such as the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic nationalism along the spine of Eastern Europe, the eastward advance of US power – through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – toward the Russian border, and the turbulent relationship between the major European states and their eastern neighbors, including Russia.

To explain this conflict is not to justify it, for there is little to justify in the bombing of a sovereign people.

Sane voices exist on all sides of ugly conflicts. In Russia, State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev of the Communist Party said soon after the Russian entry into Ukraine that he voted for the recognition of the breakaway provinces of Ukraine, he “voted for peace, not for war,” and he voted “for Russia to become a shield, so that Donbas is not bombed, and not for Kiev being bombed.”

Matveev’s voice confounds the current narrative: It brings into motion the plight of the Donbas since the US-driven coup in Ukraine in 2014, and it sounds the alarm against the full scale of the Russian intervention.

Is there room in our imagination to try to understand what Matveev is saying?

This article was produced by Globetrotter, which provided it to Asia Times.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Understanding The War In Ukraine

Wednesday, 9 March 2022
Article: Globetrotter

By Vijay Prashad / Globetrotter

The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24, 2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring of 2014 and has never stopped since.

He writes to me from the south of Kyiv/Kiev, Ukraine, and recounts an anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see…” In a war, everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate online).

Wars are among the most difficult of reporting assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent of social media and the belligerence of network news television channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict, had to run a story about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are false. Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be that of a “Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier,” but is instead a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012; the video continues to circulate on TikTok with the caption, “Little [girls] stand up to Russian soldiers.”

Meanwhile, disputing the date for the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war as February 24, Kovalevich tells me, “The war in Ukraine didn’t start in February 2022. It began in the spring of 2014 in the Donbas and has not stopped for these eight years.” Kovalevich is a member of Borotba (Struggle), a communist organization in Ukraine. Borotba, like other communist and Marxist organizations, was banned by the previous U.S.-backed Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (as part of this ongoing crackdown, two communist youth leaders—Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich—were arrested by Ukrainian security services on March 6).

“Most of our comrades had to migrate to Donetsk and Luhansk,” Kovalevich tells me. These are the two eastern provinces of mainly Russian speakers that broke away from “Ukrainian government control in 2014” and had been under the control of Russian-backed groups. In February, however, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized these “two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent,” making this contentious move the stepping stone for the final military invasion by Russia. Now, Kovalevich says, his comrades “expect to come back from exile and work legally.” This expectation is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian government will be forced to get rid of the existing system, which includes Western-trained-and-funded anti-Russian right-wing vigilante and paramilitary agents in the country, and will have to reverse many of the Poroshenko-era illiberal and anti-minority (including anti-Russian) laws.

‘I Feel Nervous’

“I feel quite nervous,” Kovalevich tells me. “[This war] looks very grim and not so much because of the Russians but because of our [Ukrainian] armed gangs that are looting and robbing [the country].” When the Russians intervened, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed out weapons to any citizen who wanted to defend the country. Kovalevich, who lives in central Ukraine just south of the capital, says, “My area was not affected by military actions—only by the terror of [right-wing] nationalist gangs.”

During the first days of the Russian military intervention, Kovalevich took in a Roma family who had fled from the war zone. “My family had a spare room,” Kovalevich tells me. Roma organizations say that there are about 400,000 Roma in Ukraine, most of them living in the western part of Ukraine, in Zakarpatska Oblast (bordering Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia). “The Roma people in our country are regularly assaulted by [right-wing] nationalists,” Kovalevich says. “The nationalists used to attack them [Roma] publicly, burning their encampments, calling it ‘cleansing garbage.’ The police didn’t react as our far-right gangs always work in cooperation with either the police or with the security service.” This Roma family, who was being sheltered by Kovalevich and his family, is on the move toward western Ukraine, where most of the Ukrainian-Roma population lives. “But it is very unsafe to move,” Kovalevich tells me. “There are nationalists [manning these] checkpoints [along] all roads [in Ukraine, and they] may shoot [anyone] who may seem suspicious to them or just rob refugees.”

Minsk Agreements

The war in the Donbas region that began in 2014 resulted in two agreements being signed in Belarus in 2014 and 2015, which were named after the capital of Belarus, and were called the Minsk agreements. These agreements were aimed at “[ending] the separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.” The second of these agreements was signed by two leading political figures from Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma, the president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005) and from Russia (Mikhail Zurabov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, 2009-2016), respectively, and was overseen by a Swiss diplomat (Heidi Tagliavini, who chaired the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 2008-2009). This Minsk II agreement was endorsed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 on February 17, 2015. If the Minsk agreements had been adhered to, Russia and Ukraine would have secured an arrangement that would have been acceptable in the Donbas.

“Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements,” Kovalevich tells me, “but didn’t fulfill it. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfill it (encouraged by the U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules—you can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfill it.” The language of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the government.” The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some cultural autonomy (this was in the footnote to Article 11 of the February 12, 2015, Minsk II Agreement). “This was unacceptable to our nationalists and [right-wing nationalists],” Kovalevich says to me. They “would like to organize purges and vengeance there [in Donetsk and Luhansk].” Before the Russian military intervention, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that more than 14,000 people had been killed in the ongoing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk despite the Minsk agreements. It is this violence that provokes Kovalevich to make his comments about the violence of the ultra-nationalists and the right-wing paramilitary. “The elected authorities are a cover, masking the real rulers of Ukraine,” Kovalevich says. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his allies in the parliament do not drive the governing process in their country but have “an agenda imposed on them by the far-right armed groups.”

Peace?

Negotiations are ongoing on the Ukraine-Belarus border between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Kovalevich is, however, not optimistic about a positive outcome from these negotiations. Decisions, he says, are not made by the Ukrainian president alone, but by the right-wing ultra-nationalist paramilitary armed groups and the NATO countries. As Kovalevich and I were speaking, the Washington Post published a report about “Plans for a U.S.-backed insurgency in Ukraine”; former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied an Afghanistan-style guerrilla war in Ukraine, saying, “We have to keep tightening the screws.” “This reveals that they [the U.S.] don’t really care about Ukrainians,” Kovalevich says. “They want to use this as an opportunity to cause some pain to the Russians.”

These comments by Clinton and others suggest to Kovalevich that the United States wants “to organize chaos between Russia and the Europeans.” Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China.” Till such a reconciliation is possible, and till Europe develops a rational foreign policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Would Putin use nuclear weapons? An arms control expert explains what has and hasn’t changed since the invasion of Ukraine



This intercontinental ballistic missile was launched as part of Russia’s test of its strategic forces in 2020. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 10, 2022 

The prospect of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seemed, until recently, to have ended with the Cold War. Threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use the weapons to keep NATO out of the Ukraine conflict have revived those decades-old fears.

The threats come amid the fraying of nuclear arms control agreements between the two nuclear superpowers that had stabilized strategic relations for decades.

As an arms control expert, I see the war in Ukraine as an added strain but not a fatal blow to the system that has helped to keep the world from nuclear devastation. That system has evolved over decades and allows U.S. and Russian officials to gauge how close the other side is to launching an attack.

Keeping an eye on each other

Arms control treaties rely on each of the nuclear superpowers sharing information about deployed delivery systems – missiles or bombers that could be used to deliver nuclear warheads – and to permit the other side to verify these claims. The treaties usually include numerical limits on weapons, and implementation of a treaty typically begins with baseline declarations by each side of numbers and locations of weapons. Numbers are updated annually. The two sides also regularly notify each other of significant changes to this baseline through what are now called Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers.

A key element of all arms control treaties has been the two sides’ ability to use “national technical means,” such as satellites, along with remote monitoring techniques such as radiation detectors, tags and seals, to monitor compliance. Remote monitoring techniques are designed to distinguish individual items such as missiles that are limited by treaty and to ensure that they are not tampered with.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty introduced a major innovation: the use of on-site inspections. Before that treaty, the Soviets had resisted U.S. proposals to include such inspections in verification. But as Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev moved domestically to a process of glasnost (openness), he embraced on-site inspections, and similar provisions have been included in subsequent treaties. They include both regular announced inspections and a certain number of annual unannounced short-term challenge inspections to guard against cheating.

Soviet weapons inspectors examine two disassembled Pershing II missiles in the U.S. in 1989. MSGT Jose Lopez Jr./Wikimedia

The history of keeping nuclear arms in check

National security scholars such as Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin developed the concept of arms control in the late 1950s and early 1960s amid an accelerating U.S.-Soviet arms race. Arms control measures were designed to increase transparency and predictability to avoid misunderstandings or false alarms that could lead to an accidental or unintended nuclear conflict. As the concept evolved, the goal of arms control measures became ensuring that defenders could respond to any nuclear attack with one of their own, which reduced incentives to engage in a nuclear war in the first place.

The approach gained traction after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the surprise deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles less than 100 miles from the U.S. brought the world to the verge of nuclear war. Initial agreements included the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT 1), which put the first ceilings on U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons. Subsequently, Gorbachev negotiated the INF treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which brought reductions in the two sides’ nuclear forces.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in the East Room of the White House on Dес. 8, 1987. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

The INF treaty for the first time banned an entire class of weapons: ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (311 and 3,418 miles). This included U.S. missiles capable of hitting Russia from the territory of U.S. allies in Europe or East Asia and vice versa. START I applied to strategic nuclear weapons, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from one superpower’s homeland to attack the other’s territory. In 2010, President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the New START agreement, which further reduced the two sides’ deployed strategic nuclear forces. And in 2021, President Joe Biden and Putin extended that treaty for five years. The treaties have supported dramatic cuts in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

New challenges for an aging system

Inspections under the INF treaty ended in 2001 after the last banned missiles were removed from deployment. Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the U.S. accused Russia of violating the treaty by developing, testing and deploying cruise missiles that exceeded its 500-kilometer limit, an accusation Russia rejected. Backed by NATO allies, the Trump administration withdrew from the treaty in 2019. This left long-range strategic weapons as the only nuclear weapons subject to arms control agreements.

Shorter-range non-strategic nuclear weapons – those with a range of less than 500 kilometers, or roughly 310 miles – have never been covered by any agreement, a sore point with Washington and NATO allies because Moscow possesses far more of them than NATO does.

Russia’s Iskander missile system launches short-range ballistic missiles with either nuclear or conventional warheads from mobile platforms. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

Arms control has been declining in other ways as well. Russia has embarked on an ambitious nuclear weapons modernization program, and some of its exotic new strategic weapon systems fall outside of New START’s restrictions. Meanwhile, cyberattacks and anti-satellite weapons loom as new threats to arms control monitoring and nuclear command and control systems.

Artificial intelligence and hypersonic missile technology could shorten the warning times for a nuclear attack. Russia has been deploying missiles that can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, sowing confusion. And Russia worries that U.S. missile defense systems, especially in Europe, threaten strategic stability by permitting the U.S. to carry out a nuclear first strike and then prevent an effective Russian nuclear response.

Before the Ukraine war, Biden and Putin had launched a Strategic Stability Dialogue to tackle these issues and lay the groundwork for negotiations on a replacement for New START before it expires in 2026. But the dialogue has been suspended with the outbreak of hostilities, and it is difficult to foresee when it might resume.

Putin turns up the heat – but not to a boil

Putin’s recent moves have further shaken the rickety strategic security architecture. On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said that “anyone who tries to interfere with us … must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history” and that Russia possesses “certain advantages in a number of the latest types of weapons.”

With the war underway, Putin announced an “enhanced combat alert” of the country’s nuclear forces, which is not a regular alert level in Russia’s system comparable to the U.S.‘s DEFCON status. In practice, the enhanced combat alert consisted largely of adding staff to shifts at relevant nuclear weapon sites. The announcement was designed to discourage NATO from intervening and to intimidate Ukraine.

Nonetheless, U.S. national security officials expressed concern that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine if NATO forces were drawn into direct conflict with Russia. Use of the weapons is consistent with Russia’s military doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate,” according to the officials.

Even in the face of Putin’s strategic nuclear saber rattling and concerns about Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons, however, the arms control framework has held sufficiently firm to preserve strategic stability. U.S. nuclear commanders have criticized Putin’s moves but have not sought to match them. They do not see evidence that Putin has taken steps to escalate the situation, like placing non-strategic nuclear warheads on airplanes or ships or sending nuclear-armed submarines to sea.

So far, arms control has played its intended role of limiting the scope and violence in Ukraine, keeping a lid on a conflict that otherwise could become a world war.

Author

Miles A. Pomper
Senior Fellow, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury
Disclosure statement
Miles A. Pomper has led several research projects for CNS which have received funding from NATO member states, including the United States and several European allies. His research has also been supported by grants from foundations interested in arms control