Tag: russia

Russian MoD on US Biolabs: One Goal Was to Create Bioagents That Can Target Certain Ethnic Groups

The Russian Defence Ministry earlier announced that the United States had poured money into biological research facilities in Ukraine, alleging they may have been used in order to create biological weapons and conduct bat coronavirus-related experiments.

Among the goals of the biological research laboratories in Ukraine suspected of having been funded by the United States was the creation of bioagents that would be capable of targeting certain ethnic groups, the Russian Defence Ministry revealed on Thursday.

“The available documents confirm numerous cases of the transfer of biological samples of Ukrainian citizens abroad. With a high degree of probability, we can say that one of the tasks of the United States and its allies is the creation of bioagents that can selectively affect various ethnic groups of the population”, said Igor Kirillov, the head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops of the Russian Armed Forces.

Kirillov said that 350 cryocontainers with blood serum samples were transferred from the Public Health Centre of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine to a reference laboratory for infectious diseases at Australia’s Doherty Institute under the pretext of determining antibody titers.

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Umm… Are We The Baddies?

Reuters reports that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms’ hate speech terms of service due to the war in Ukraine:

“Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.”

Twitter has also altered its rules against incitement and death threats in the case of Russian leaders and military personnel, as Ben Norton explains here for Multipolarista.

Last month we also learned that Facebook is now allowing users to praise the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion because of the war, a move that is arguably the most liberal thing that has ever happened.

Western institutions everywhere are rejecting all things Russia with such a savage degree of xenophobia it really ought to shock anyone who was born after the 1800s. Everything from Russian athletes to Russian musicians to Russian-made films to Russian composers to Russian Netflix shows to lectures about Russian authors to Russian restaurants to Russian vodka to Russian-bred cats to Russian trees to dishes that sound a little too much like “Putin” have been cancelled to varying degrees around the western world.

Normally when the US and its allies are involved in a war they’ll at least pay lip service to the notion that they have nothing but good will for the people of the enemy nation, claiming they only oppose their oppressive rulers. With Russia it’s just a complete rejection of the entire culture, the entire ethnicity. It’s a widespread promotion of hatred for the actual people because of who they are.

These are the people who are being smashed with crushing economic sanctions while western pundits proclaim that “There are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore” and ask “At what point do you hold a people responsible for putting an evil despot in power?” This even as the Russian people are being arrested by the thousands in anti-war protests, putting to shame our own western society that has generally slept through war after war in the years since 9/11 while our militaries have been killing of millions of people.

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The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine

On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.

As the crisis in Ukraine has escalated, millions have turned to TikTok for information on what is happening there in real time. TikTok videos offered some of the first glimpses of the Russian invasion and since then the platform has been a primary outlet for spreading news to the masses abroad. Ukrainian citizens hiding in bomb shelters or fleeing their homes have shared their stories to the platform, while dangerous misinformation and Russian propaganda have also spread. And TikTok stars, many with millions of followers, have increasingly sought to make sense of the crisis for their audiences.

The White House has been closely watching TikTok’s rise as a dominant news source, leading to its decision to approach a select group of the platform’s most influential names.

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Meta changes policy, says Facebook and Instagram users may call for violence against Russians, Putin’s assassination

Users of Facebook and Instagram in certain countries will be temporarily allowed to call for and threaten violence against Russian citizens and Russian troops, according to a new report.

In a change to Meta‘s hate speech policy, users in these countries will be able to make such posts only in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Reuters, citing internal emails.

“The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland,” the report from Reuters says. “These calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method.”

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DuckDuckGo CEO Announces Google-Style Censorship Scheme of Content Deemed ‘Russian Disinformation’

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg on Wednesday announced the rollout of a new Google-style censorship scheme to down-rank websites he says are “associated with Russian disinformation.”

“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️,” Weinberg tweeted. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

“In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics,” he continued.

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Zelensky Thirst Is Making Liberals Look Like Absolute Clowns

Every few years, during times of great political and sociocultural turmoil, liberals seek respite by sexually objectifying the first halfway decent-looking man they see. It happened with Michael Avenatti in 2016, then Robert Mueller the following year, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo during the 2020 pandemic. Sometimes, this sentiment results in uncomfortable public displays of horniness, as exemplified by Mueller erotic fan fiction and the infamous Beto O’Rourke sex tweet. But more often than not, it’s just embarrassing for everyone involved, particularly when these political figures reveal themselves to be more fragile than all-powerful Daddies and disappoint us, as they invariably do.

It seems, however, that liberals have failed to learn their lesson, as history is repeating itself with the latest horniness cycle over Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Following Putin’s invasion of his country, Zelensky has made headlines for his staunch bravery in the face of brutal military aggression, posting photos on social media of himself drinking with his soldiers rather than hiding out, and reportedly telling the Biden administration when it offered to airlift him out of Ukraine that he needed “more ammunition, not a ride.” The fact that Zelensky is not an establishment politician, but a former comedian who once went viral for playing “Hava Nagila” with his penis, has only added to the public’s admiration of his integrity and sterling courage.

This admiration for Zelensky, however, is manifesting itself in an unsettling way: with women making thirsty posts about him on TikTok and Twitter, many consisting of slideshows of the president over Mariah Carey’s “Hero.”

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Cardiff Philharmonic removes Tchaikovsky from programme in light of Russian invasion of Ukraine

The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its programme of its upcoming concert ‘in light of the recent Russian invasion’.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was due to be included in the orchestra’s upcoming all-Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but it was considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time’.

The 1812 Overture was written to commemorate the successful Russian defence against Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, featuring cannon fire, chimes and a brass fanfare. The piece was due to be performed alongside another militaristic work by Tchaikovsky: his 1876 Marche slave, written to celebrate Russia’s involvement in the Serbian-Ottoman War. The composer’s Second Symphony was the final piece in the programme.

The orchestra will instead present a programme centred around Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, with John Williams‘s The Cowboys Overture opening the concert, and a performance of Elgar‘s Enigma Variations in the second half.

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Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them

Self-anointed “fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? — but nonetheless they invoked their characteristically authoritative, above-it-all tone of self-assurance and self-arrogated right to decree the truth and label such claims false.

Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: “The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims “disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further “proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

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