Tag: russia

Unprovoked!

In an interview with the Useful Idiots podcast not too long ago, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.

“Right now, if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked’ Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said.

“It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

“Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top U.S. diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the C.I.A.”

Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent many months mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many Western experts spent years warning that the actions of Western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

Keep reading

Death From Above: Drones Are Changing the Landscape of War

On the third floor of an abandoned factory in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, 39-year-old “Rem” struggles to light a cigarette while holding the remote control of his Chinese-made drone. He swears. Several feet behind him, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a soldier known as “Duke” is surveying a map of the eastern approach to the city on his tablet. A dozen Russian positions have been marked with red crosses, bearing such evocative names as “mattress,” “putin,” and “machine gun.”

The ping of a notification coming from Duke’s phone finally breaks the silence. “Fire,” says Duke in Ukrainian, staring intently at the screen of his tablet. A loud bang rattles the walls and windows, followed by a whizzing sound rapidly rising above the building, getting fainter, and then stopping. A couple of seconds later, the live feed from the drone’s camera shows the shell landing right on a Russian position. “That’s perfect,” exclaims Rem, also in Ukrainian. “Exactly where we needed it.” The two men rejoice. Thanks to their store-bought DJI Matrice drone, the accurate fire from a Polish-made Krab self-propelled howitzer has silenced a Russian automatic grenade launcher.

Both from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Rem and Duke have been serving in the Skala intelligence battalion since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Created and led by Iurii Skala, a veteran of the Donbas war, this battalion is made up of mostly inexperienced volunteers like Rem, who was a car dealer prior to the invasion. 

For three weeks, he and Duke have been surveying enemy movements and directing artillery fire from their position, somewhere in the center of Bakhmut. This small salt-mining town of roughly 70,000 inhabitants has been devastated by months of shelling and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons to the First World War and the battles of Verdun or Passchendaele. But even as exhausted soldiers shoot at the enemy from mud-filled trenches and men perish by the dozens every day from unending artillery fire, the ever-growing use of drones has revolutionized the nature of the fighting in Bakhmut — and in Ukraine at large.

In the basement of a residential building located a few blocks from their position, a portly officer is bent over a table, listening intently to a walkie-talkie. Facing him is a flat screen television that transmits live footage from a drone circling above the city. The air is thick with anticipation. When word of a successful strike finally comes through, the officer triumphantly throws his fist in the air before slumping back in his chair. “Now we can move easily,” he says, grinning. Guided by one of the Skala battalion’s drones, artillery fire has silenced a Russian position.

Keep reading

Russia Says It Shot Down a UFO

Amystery object described by one local news outlet as a “UFO” has been shot down in the southern Russian region of Rostov.

Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a “small-size object in the shape of a ball” had been discovered flying “in the wind” at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3. With the object spotted above the village of Sultan Sala in the region’s Myasnikovsky district, Golubev said “the decision was taken to liquidate it.”

“I urge everyone to remain calm. To ensure security, all forces and means are involved. The sky is covered with anti-aircraft defenses,” he added, without specifying what the object was.

In reporting his comments, local news outlet Pivyet Rostov carried a headline that said “a UFO in the form of a ball was shot down in the sky.”

Telegram channels that night described how air defense systems in Rostov had been operating. The channel Ostorozhna, Novosti (Caution, News) published a video showing a shining object flying and then exploding in the sky.

“Look, another one has gone,” someone is heard saying in the clip, which was captioned, “another video of the work of Rostov regional air defenses.” A witness told the channel how “there was a very strong explosion” and that “everything in the house shook. We realized that the air defenses were in operation.”

Keep reading

Ukraine Arms Trafficking: The Waltz of Bloody Clowns

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Through an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity (especially with regard to the management of the health crisis), Europe has sent massive arms to Ukraine. Weapons that will undoubtedly end up killing Pierre, Jacques, Anne, even you or me.

This is the boomerang effect already seen through the ridiculous imposition of “sanctions trains”: before releasing 100 million euros to equip the Ukrainian armed forces, it is hard to believe that French President Emmanuel Macron did not understand the risk that its weapons will be used to equip entities that do not care about France’s interests in protecting its own population. (1)

Since last March, the NATO and G7 countries have been massively feeding President Zelensky and his clique with weapons of all kinds. (2)

The hunger of Kiev’s bloody clown is never satisfied, however.

In doing so, many of these weapons also end up in the hands of various terrorist groups around the world, including in Africa, fueling political instability there. (3)

The director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, indicated that Ukraine spends “the staggering amount of six billion dollars each month” on the war, this sum being provided to Zelensky by his Western ‘partners.’ (4)

These are hundreds of thousands of pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns and grenades, and hundreds of millions of cartridges of various calibers exported to Ukraine over the past eight months. Even NATO-supported Kosovo Albanians have not benefited from such largess.

Keep reading

Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

Keep reading

Thomas Massie: $100B for Ukraine Could Have Given an Extra $200M to Every Congressional District in U.S.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is blasting Republicans, Democrats, and President Joe Biden for their approving more than $100 billion in American taxpayer money for Ukraine this year.

As part of a year-end $1.7 trillion spending package, 18 Senate Republicans and nine House Republicans voted with Democrats to throw another $45 billion in taxpayer money at Ukraine — bringing the total amount of taxpayer money sent to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, to more than $110 billion.

Massie, in a Twitter post on Wednesday, noted that the more than $100 billion approved for Ukraine this year could have, instead, been spent on every United States congressional district.

“$100 billion to Ukraine. Let’s put that in perspective. That’s more than $200 million this year from each Congressional district,” Massie wrote. “What could your congressman have done for your district with $200 million? How long will the kids in your district be paying interest on this debt?”

Keep reading

Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok’s Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Times has claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”

Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.

Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.

Among those concessions is that TikTok is now outsourcing what the U.S. Government calls “content moderation” — a pleasant-sounding euphemism for political censorship — to groups controlled by the U.S. Government:

TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including an agreement for Oracle Corp to store the data of the app’s users in the United States and a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions. It has spent $1.5 billion on hiring and reorganization costs to build up that unit, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Perhaps one might view as reasonable U.S. concerns that China can weaponize TikTok to propagandize Americans and destabilize the U.S. through its power to censor the platform. Note, however, that this is precisely the same concern that countries like China, Iran and Russia all invoke to justify censorship compliance as a condition for U.S. internet companies to remain active in their country. Those countries fear that American tech companies — whose close partnership with U.S. security agencies has long been well-documented — will be used to propagandize and destabilize their populations and countries exactly the way that the U.S. Security State is apparently concerned that China can do to the U.S. via TikTok.

Keep reading

Could a zombie virus frozen in the remains of a woolly mammoth leak from a Russian lab and spark a new pandemic? Scientists aim to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed Siberian beasts for testing

The majestic creature had lain silently in the permafrost for more than a million years. But all it took was a curious scientist, tinkering with its long-dead body, to unleash a terrible new pandemic on the world.

No, it’s not the plot of a woolly mammoth sequel to Jurassic Park, nor another theory on the origins of Covid-19 — though the result of this scientific investigation could be horribly similar.

It’s the story of how, right now, Russian researchers are unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an attempt to ‘reawaken’ Stone Age viruses.

Such viruses are thought to have remained dormant for millennia in the frozen remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species in northeast Siberia.

Like the virus that caused Covid-19, these prehistoric ‘paleoviruses’ are unfamiliar to the human body and, were they ever to find their way across the species barrier, catastrophe could follow. We would, after all, have no natural defence.

The woolly mammoths that roamed the Siberian steppes — until the last one died some 10,000 years ago — were fearsome creatures. The size of an elephant, they had sharp tusks that could spear a human unwise enough to get near.

For biologists, they seem to hold an enduring fascination. Last year, a project called Colossal was launched, aiming to tweak the genetic code of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to create a hybrid animal that could survive in the Arctic Circle.

This latest project — carried out by Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector — aims to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed these frozen beasts, and take it back to the lab for experimentation.

What could possibly go wrong? To conjure up the all-too-real nightmare scenario, you only have to hear the history of Vector.

Keep reading

CIA’s Deadly “Strategy of Tension” to Destroy Russia

On Monday, the Russian Federation Engels airbase in the Saratov region, nearly 400 miles from Ukraine, was attacked for a second time since the beginning of Russia’s SMO.

“Russia’s Defense Ministry said the incident took place in the early hours of Monday, and three servicemen were killed by debris at the Engels airbase, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in launching strikes on Ukraine in the 10-month-old war,” reports the Associated Press.

There have been a number of attacks inside Russia—in Kursk, the city of Bryansk, the village of Staraya Nelidovka in the Belgorod region, and the military airfields at Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region, in addition to Engels.

The attacks on gas infrastructure occurred prior to Russia announcing it would resume deliveries to Azerbaijan via the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

The corporate war propaganda media has attributed the attacks to Ukraine. However,  according to the Daily Express, Jack Murphy, described as a former “US Army Special Operations operative,” said last week

that NATO and US intelligence agencies have been running agents inside Russia, directing them to target critical infrastructure in a bid to create “chaos.” Shopping centres, gas pipelines and fuel depots have all suffered damage across Russia in recent months with Mr Murphy pointing to a CIA-directed campaign of covert “sabotage.”

On his website, Murphy writes the “campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.”

Keep reading

‘CIA is behind spate of explosions in Russia’: US Army Special Ops veteran claims intelligence agency and NATO ally are conducting sabotage missions

The CIA is combining with the spy service of a NATO ally in Europe to conduct covert sabotage operations inside Russia, according to new claims.

The clandestine campaign is behind many unexplained explosions and fires that have hit strategic or prominent facilities in recent months, says US expert Jack Murphy, an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran.

Separately other European intelligence services have allegedly been ‘running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help’, as has Ukraine.

His claims follow as a new fire struck a shopping mall in Krasnodar region, in southern Russia, the latest in dozens of such incidents. It comes as Putin issued another chilling warning to the West on Christmas day.

In Ukraine today, air raid sirens have been going off around the country as some decide to move their Christmas day to avoid celebrating on the same day as Russia. 

Oil and gas facilities, railways, fuel depots, power plants and shopping malls have been hit across Russia by mysterious explosions, with rumours of sabotage.

‘The campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines,’ said Murphy in a post.

‘The campaign is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.’

He cited anonymous US sources including three former intelligence and two military officials, and a sixth source ‘who has been briefed on the campaign’.

The CIA has denied the allegations.

Keep reading