Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Ragnarok Part IX -- Could This Go Nuclear?

    First up, a quick look at some headlines:

    Ukraine has fought back much harder during the first week than Vladimir Putin expected, or very probably than his generals promised him, it would. But these are still the early stages of what could be a very nasty war.

    Putin must have hoped that a few days after Russian forces invaded, Kyiv would have fallen. And he surely expected that Western countries, cowed and divided, would have accepted that he had reclaimed a territory that he says is historically part of Russia.

    None of this has happened. Ukraine has proved a hard nut to crack, and the reaction of Western countries, particularly Germany, has been far fiercer than he thought. Russia's economy has already been savagely hit. Putin's one big friend, China, now seems worried that this Western upsurge of anger might, one day, be turned against China itself - and that serious damage could be done to the Chinese economy. It has already distanced itself from the invasion.

    Nato, by contrast, might be strengthened. Finland and Sweden could both end up joining the alliance for their own protection. Putin launched this war in part to stop Ukraine one day joining Nato, but he could find more Nato members on his north-western border.

    These are all major setbacks for him. They stem from Putin's own miscalculations, made while he isolated himself from Covid. He saw only a very few advisers, who we can assume told him what he wanted to hear. Now he will have to reach for new options. He has always refused to back down when he is rebuffed. He will hit back harder - and he has the weapons to do it.

    The Ukrainian ambassador to the US claims that Russian forces have already used a thermobaric weapon - what people call a "vacuum bomb", which sucks in oxygen to generate a high-temperature explosion. Ambassadors at times like this often make extreme claims, but the fact is we have already seen video of Russian thermobaric rocket launchers on their way to Ukraine. Analysts say it is probably only a matter of time before they are used more widely.

    This is the astonishing moment dozens of diplomats from around the world today walked out during a speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a Geneva disarmament conference in protest against Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. 

    Diplomats from countries including Britain, United States and France stood up and filed out of the room when Lavrov's pre-recorded video message to the U.N. Human Rights Council began to play. 

    During his speech, the foreign minister blamed Ukraine for the war and claimed Kyiv has been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons - a 'real danger' that required a Russian response.

    'Today the dangers that (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskiy's regime pose for neighbouring countries and international security in general have increased substantially after the authorities set up in Kyiv have embarked upon dangerous games related to plans to acquire their own nuclear weapons,' Lavrov told the Conference on Disarmament in a video address.

    'Ukraine still has Soviet nuclear technologies and the means of delivery of such weapons. We cannot fail to respond to this real danger,' he said, also calling for Washington to rebase its nuclear weapons from Europe.

    Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday in what it called a special operation to demilitarise and 'denazify' the country - a justification dismissed by Kyiv and the West as propaganda. 

Another BBC article, attempting to explain Putin's motivations, explains:

    He has not only demanded that Ukraine never join Nato but that the alliance turns the clock back to 1997 and reverses its eastward expansion. He has complained Russia has "nowhere further to retreat to - do they think we'll just sit idly by?".

    He wants Nato to remove its forces and military infrastructure from member states that joined the alliance from 1997 and not to deploy "strike weapons near Russia's borders". That means Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

    But this goes beyond Nato. In the words of Germany's chancellor, Russia's leader "wants to take over Europe according to his world view".

    Last year, President Putin wrote a long piece describing Russians and Ukrainians as "one nation", and he has described the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 as the "disintegration of historical Russia".

    He has claimed modern Ukraine was entirely created by communist Russia and is now a puppet state, controlled by the West. It was his pressure on Ukraine not to sign an association treaty with the EU in 2013 that sparked the protests that ousted its pro-Kremlin president.

    In President Putin's eyes, the West promised back in 1990 that Nato would expand "not an inch to the east", but did so anyway.

    That was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, so the promise made to then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev only referred to East Germany in the context of a reunified Germany. Mr Gorbachev said later "the topic of Nato expansion was never discussed" at the time. 

Unfortunately, Russia's actions may have produced the exact result that Putin wanted to avoid. According to Politico, Finnish lawmakers are not only considering seeking admission to NATO, but Finland will be shipping weapons to Ukraine. And if Finland joins, it is a good bet that Sweden would also, notwithstanding Russian threats that it "would trigger 'serious military-political consequences' from Moscow for the two countries." Germany, also in response to the invasion, will be increasing its military spending--up to €100bn if German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is to be believed.

It’s evident that what currently passes for the Russo-Ukrainian war is not over Ukraine’s territory or its people, but rather, is aimed at the neocon-funded Orange Revolution that installed the current regime. The fact that the US, NATO, and EU are all willing to go to extremes to keep the illegitimate Zelensky in regime should suffice to show the delicate state of the neo-liberal world order, just as the fact that the Russians were willing to upset what was a stable and mutually profitable situation tends to indicate either a) something was developing in Ukraine that absolutely had to be stopped by force or b) this limited conflict is simply the first stage, and the initial front, of a much larger Sino-Russian challenge to the global satanists and their imperial disorder.

  • Ukraine has, since the invasion, said that it should develop nuclear weapons, but that it had plans to do so prior to the invasion is something new. Nevertheless, it appears that there was some bioresearch programs ongoing:

    The United States and Ukraine agreed yesterday to work jointly to prevent the spread of biological weapons, signing a pact that clears the way for Ukraine's government to receive U.S. aid to improve security at facilities where dangerous microbes are kept.

    The agreement, the result of more than a year of negotiations, was announced by Sens. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The senators credited Ukraine's reformist leaders, ushered into power by last fall's Orange Revolution, with breaking bureaucratic resistance to the pact.

    One lab to receive funding is the I.I. Mechnikov Antiplague Scientific and Research Institute, in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. The institute was part of a Cold War network of "antiplague" stations that supplied highly lethal pathogens to Soviet bioweapons factories.

    Confidential Pentagon papers have been leaked, revealing that the United states government has been operating top-secret biolabs in Ukraine and conducting biological experiments on Ukrainian soldiers while receiving complete legal indemnification for fatalities and injuries.

    As the mainstream media and fact checkers continue to assert there are no Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine, fresh evidence emerges proving them wrong.

    Internal papers illustrate what Anthony Fauci-sponsored “protection” and Pentagon “defense” means in practice, even as the US plans to boost its military presence in Eastern Europe to “protect its allies against Russia.”

    The Pentagon has performed biological tests on 4,400 soldiers in Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia, with possibly fatal results. All “volunteer deaths” should be reported within 24 hours (in Ukraine) and 48 hours (in the United States), according to the stolen papers (in Georgia).

    Both nations are regarded as the region’s most devoted US allies, with a number of Pentagon initiatives being undertaken on their soil.

Of course, you need to take such reports with a grain of salt. I had a friend in college that worked on the student paper, and he got all excited when he learned that the Army was conducting experiments on campus. Turned out that it was looking at ways to improve typing skills.

    Ukraine is a highly devout country – about 87% of its 41 million citizens practice Christianity. So it's notable that, to many Ukrainians, Mary Magdalene now has a new moniker: St. Javelin.

    The viral meme (shown above) recasting the "Apostle of the apostles" is in reverence to a device that knows no religion: the FGM-148 Javelin portable fire-and-forget anti-tank missile. Since the start of Putin's dastardly invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian freedom fighters have extensively utilized the American-made weapon system – co-produced by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon – to rain destruction down upon the Russian military's armored vehicles. Ukraine's Defense Ministry estimates that 102 tanks and 536 armored vehicles had been destroyed as of February 26th. The Javelin likely factored heavily into that rousing combat success.

    "This weapon allows a single soldier to target and destroy even the most heavily armored main battle tank with an almost guaranteed kill rate, at great range and with minimal risk," Army Capt. Vincent Delany wrote of the Javelin for West Point's Modern War Institute.

    So how does this 'holy' piece of military machinery work? Laypersons might be envisioning a bazooka-like operation, but anti-tank weapons have evolved considerably since that quintessential rocket launcher was deployed in World War II. With the Javelin, a soldier using the portable, reusable Command Launch Unit (CLU) looks through an infrared sight to locate a target up to an incredible 2.5 miles away. When the user spots a target, he operates a cursor to set a square around it, almost like cropping an image. This is then sent to the onboard guidance computer on the missile itself, which has a sophisticated algorithmic tracking system coupled with an infrared imaging device. When the missile locks on to the target, the operator can launch the self-guided weapon and quickly relocate or reload to fire another missile at a different target.

* * *

    A second innovation of the Javelin is that it strikes from above. The missile rises high into the air, up to 490 feet, then blasts down on its target from a steep angle, striking the top of an armored vehicle or tank, where the armor is typically weakest.

    Russian tanks are not helpless against the Javelin. Most are equipped with explosive reactive armor. When struck by a penetrating weapon like a missile, the armor detonates, blasting a metal plate outwards to damage the missile's penetrator and prevent it from piercing the tank's main armor. The Javelin overcomes this by having tandem warheads, one to deal with the reactive armor plate, and the second to impact the tank's armor itself. Modern Russian tanks are also equipped with a radar system called Arena, which detects incoming missiles and automatically fires a wide burst of projectiles to destroy or redirect them. But here, again, the Javelin reigns supreme, Delany says.

    "The Javelin can defeat Arena while in top-attack mode, due to the missile descending from too steep an angle for the system to engage properly," he wrote.

    Ukraine had been shipped roughly 77 launchers and 740 missiles before Putin invaded. Many, many more of each are now on the way courtesy of the U.S. and European allies. May the Ukrainians put them to good use. Slava Ukraini!

Since literally hundreds of military cargo flights were landing in Ukraine in the days before the Russian advance, I'm sure Ukraine received far more.

    Gas and oil, and thus who tried to curtail both, explain a lot of the current mess. The nihilist Biden decision voluntarily to cancel new pipelines, federal leases, ANWAR, and leverage loss of bank financing for fracking, and to give up well over 2 million barrels of daily production will be seen not just as an economic disaster. It was a strategic catastrophe. 

    When Europe, or indeed the West, is dependent on Russian goodwill to drive and keep warm, it can never be free. Ending American energy independence is not just an AOC obsession. Russian hackers in January targeted our Colonial pipeline, shutting down in a day over 1 million barrels of transported oil. The more we discount the strategic consequences of having or lacking oil, the more our enemies fixate on it. 

    A couple of questions for Joe Biden: Before he took office, was the United States begging Russia to sell it more oil? After he took office, why was it? 

    Why did Biden blow-up energy dependence? Could not tomorrow Biden reverse course, greenlight the Keystone pipeline, reverse his mindless opposition to the EastMed pipeline that would help allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel to help other allies in southern Europe, and throw open new federal leasing to supply exports of liquid natural gas to Europe? 

    What is moral, and what amoral: alienating Bernie Sanders and the squad or keeping our allies and ourselves safe from foreign attack? What is so ethical about following the green advice of billionaires like global jet-setter John Kerry at the expense of the middling classes who cannot afford to drive their cars or warm their living rooms?


    Secondly is the question of whether this conflict could turn nuclear. It's been on everyone's mind since Putin ordered his nuclear forces into a higher level of alert. Obviously part of the problem here, as others have pointed out, is that a Ukraine as part of NATO would not only allow the U.S. to preposition troops where they could quickly cut Russia's access to its Caspian oil fields, but possibly also place nuclear weapons in Ukraine. A similar positioning of nuclear weapons in Turkey and Cuba almost touched off a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crises, so why would we think it should be different here.

    But a perhaps more pressing issue is that the economic sanctions are tanking Russia's economy. The Hill reports:

    As Russian President Vladimir Putin wages war against Ukraine, his country’s economy has begun to collapse under the weight of unprecedented penalties from the Biden administration, United Kingdom, European Union and other major economic players.

    “Everyone in the economic sphere, the banking sphere, knows we’re in new territory here—a coordinated shutdown of a country’s economy with the strongest arrow being in the heart of the banking sector,” said George Lopez, expert on economic sanctions at University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

    The value of the ruble plunged Monday after the U.S and its allies took action to cut the Russian government off from roughly $600 billion in reserves held by the Central Bank of Russia and further cut Russia’s ties to the global financial system. 

    The Western bloc banned most transactions with the Russian central bank — along with Russia’s finance ministry and foreign investment fund — blocking Putin from funds he stowed away for years to cushion the blow of sanctions. The sanctions also cut off Russian access to the U.S. dollar, the linchpin of the global financial system, as its value climbs amid global tumult.

    The U.S. and EU are also barring certain Russian banks from access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging system used by banks to conduct transactions. 

    Roughly $300 billion of Russia’s reserves are now locked away from Putin in the U.S., Europe, and other allied countries. While Russia still holds billions of dollars worth of gold within its borders, experts say Moscow will find few willing buyers with its banks under their own crushing sanctions.

    “The problem is they can’t convert it into something useful if other people aren’t willing to deal with them,” said Derek Tang, co-founder and economist at research firm Monetary Policy Analytics. 

    “They own it, but they can't use it.”

Biden may express his confidence that Russia would not resort to nuclear weapons, probably because he thinks that Russia would not do so unless invaded, but Harry J. Kazianis, writing at The Spectator, thinks otherwise. He explains:

    Back in 2012, I pressed my Russian colleague, asking in what other situations Russia would use nuclear weapons, if any. He explained that “if anything threatens our ability to exist as a nation and prosper, it is my view that we would use nuclear weapons.”

    I didn’t believe him then, but I do now.

    With Russian President Vladimir Putin now putting his nation’s nuclear forces on alert status, Moscow is signaling to us that recent arms shipments, sanctions, lashings in the media, and pressure placed on the Putin government are rattling nerves.

    Putin is trying to tell us in no uncertain terms that we are coming close to his geopolitical redlines and, like a caged animal, he will strike back if we apply too much pressure. That could even mean using nuclear weapons.

    Recent sanctions that have targeted Russian banks and their access to the SWIFT messaging network were surely the triggers for Putin to flex his nuclear muscles. With ten Russian banks now essentially locked out of global markets and Moscow’s Central Bank limited in how it can use its $600 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves, Putin is now facing what could be a financial crisis on par with what Boris Yeltsin faced in 1998, when the Russian economy nearly collapsed.

* * *
    But here is where things could go from bad to worse. If both sides can’t come to a deal, Putin may decide to truly go all in against Kyiv, determining that a scorched earth policy and winning at any cost is better than taking weeks or months to take the country in full. The level of carnage we would see would be something akin to images from World War II: bombed-out cities, bodies on the streets, and total carnage everywhere.

    The world would be horrified — and would demand action against Russia. What would the West do? It’s likely that more weapons would flow into Ukraine on a grand scale, putting more pressure on Putin to respond. More sanctions would then follow, including disconnecting all of Russia’s banks and financial institutions from SWIFT, including entities tied to Russian energy, the lifeblood of Moscow’s economy.

    At that point, Russia’s way of life, its ability to exist, would be threatened. The Putin regime would be threatened. What, oh, what would Moscow do then? Think “escalate to deescalate” — and that could mean something horrible for all of us.

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Prior Posts:

5 comments:

  1. Stolen elections have consequences.

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    1. It will be interesting to see if Biden has a breakdown while giving his speech tonight.

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  2. Russia has never been any good at diplomacy and public relations. They are a primitive and brutal culture...mirroring the climate and landscape they originated from. As such, the only thing they understand and will respond to is brute force. The failure of our policymakers to understand the Russian mentality is why ,almost 80 years afetr the end of World War II, our relationship remains pretty much the same...standoffish.

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    1. I think one of the problems that Russia had on the public relations front--at least in regard to Americans--is that the average American will almost always root for the underdog, which in this case is Ukraine.

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Democrats Are So Cute Thinking Nothing Has Changed

I'm just kidding: they are just as ugly and evil as before. But it is amusing to see how some still do not understand what has happened....