by Chris Faure for the Saker Blog

Russia is beginning to respond to the insane sanctions, and the sanctions are insane.

“Russia will stop deliveries of rocket engines to US – Russian Space Agency chief. The Roscosmos chief added, “Let them fly into space on their broomsticks.”

And we all say OORAH!

OneWeb Pulls Workers from Russian-run Baikonur Satellite Launch Project

The London-based tech company OneWeb has removed its employees from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrone, where they had planned to send 36 Internet satellites into orbit using a Russian Soyuz rocket.

The move comes after Russian space agency Roscosmos demanded guarantees that their satellites wouldn’t be used for military purposes, and that the UK government – which owns shares in OneWeb – divest itself from the company.

The Russian (ROC) Paralympics athletes have just been banned by the Olympics Committee from taking part in the Olympics in Beijing.

But Coca-Cola will continue to operate in Russia

The ICC (International Criminal Court) is in the process of accepting the Ukraine’s complaint of war crimes or crimes against humanity against Russia and Belarus in the Ukraine. (Israel and Palestine comes to mind and also the Yemen). The complainer has to have membership of course, but the ICC has awarded a quasi membership to Ukraine from nowhere.

Russian individuals are facing hate-filled attacks, diplomatic buildings and athletes are being targeted for exclusion. Reports of Russians being discriminated against are spreading far and wide. This is similar to what happened the previous two years with Chinese citizens as a result of the propaganda against China.

There is a very dark underbelly to sanctions which are of course war by any other name. Trump called it! by calling it a Trade War, when it was against China. What the west wants, is to loot Russia from the ground up and just make them go away in some form or fashion, because they cannot take Russia by Dollar and/or Bomb.

Western governments, media, think tanks etc., are so desperate to believe their version of the outcome of the Ukraine war that they are seeing things which have no basis in reality. And their fear that things will not turn out the way they want them to, is visible. They are having Terrible Two Tantrums.

It is however filtering through to European leaders. They are figuring out that Russian sanctions are already having an impact and on them directly.

And the countries are not all in some special cahoots here. They are being threatened. We have news from India that they are being threatened with sanctions because they stood neutral in the last security council vote and did not condemn Russia in one or another fashion. Of course, they do not call it by name but rather: US weighing up sanctions against India over Russian military stockpiles (The Hill).   Please be aware, this is not some game, but the stakes are high, as the sanctions war and the cyber war are all, and I mean all, western attempts at regaining its lost power and luster.

We see how Russian-owned businesses, private jets, money, and real estate are being looted. The west is just stealing it, like oil and grain from Syria. This time they want to do to Russia what they did in the early 1990’s yet again. The idea is to rape Russia again, because how dare Russia charge for their oil and for their business. How dare Russia act like a country or even people that have the right to make a business, do trade, be concerned about their security and function in the wider world. What is being tried here, is to do to Russia exactly the same as what was done to Japan, after Japan surrendered in WWII, but this time they want to do as much as they can, without waging real war (so far).

You can see an example of the looting here: Poland started seizing (or looting) Russian Property in Warsaw, including even a school building.

And then of course there was Josep Borrell saying in a fit of pique:  Oh Dear, we cannot find Russia’s Central Bank Assets. They must have planned for sanctions. (This from memory as I cannot find his tweet. But then again, this is what they do! They make a big statement and then quietly delete what they said.).

This is what sanctions look like. Everything has a ‘carve out’. Sanctions do not work, excepting to pressurize and gain the upper hand in western media. This is how they think, trying to find a concerted calculated effort to loot Russia again, but the mistakes being made are not only comical but also very very serious, and perhaps not for Russia.

Here is one story:

1. On Tuesday a law was passed prohibiting Russian owned, operated, controlled, registered or flagged ships from accessing British ports – but theoretically foreign vessels could carry Russia’s oil and gas to Britain.

OOPS! BUT …

2. The UK Department of Transport confirmed that Russian oil and gas can still arrive in the country despite sanctions barring Russian ships from entering their ports, as bans only apply to the vessels not the cargo itself.

OOPS! Did we go bananas again? How does oil and gas get there without the vessel?  Let’s try and fix it.

3. Well, we don’t know.  We are So Confused, so how about British MPs calling for the Expulsion of ALL Russians from UK.

Japan’s JAL, canceled ALL flights to Europe – the airlines would normally use Russian airspace to make the journey.

OOPS! (This country is killing its own industry).

Bank bailouts by taxpayers due to Russian sanctions? But of course.  Some shareholders of Société Générale in France are speaking about a €2.7 billion loss linked to sanctions on its Russian subsidiary Rosbank.

OOPS! How about sanctioning your own company? Please bail out the bank! They’re apparently asking for indemnities from French and European authorities.

It has become known that the US nuclear industry is lobbying to continue importing enriched uranium from Russia at low prices despite the situation in Ukraine, as it is seen as a key element in keeping US electricity prices low.

OOPS! Is it time for flying off on a broom again?

Btw, the flagship Apple Store has just opened again in Russia, with iPhones and other tech now returning with a 20-30% markup.

Is it really that simple? Are these western influences really committing economic harakiri just so they can hide their own economic fall and of course: Blame Russia?

The true colors of the west are now shown in full daylight. Their claims on a monopoly on virtue is a clear and convincing demonstration of their own hypocrisy. There is no need to listen to the West.

Russia is taking it. They are taking what they must and protecting what they must. The big reveal is how many organizations and companies are totally controlled by western financial sources. This is the biggest surprise to many of us. We truly live in a world of neo-nazis and fascists. Look, I knew they were in the Ukraine, and in spots in the world, but I never knew it was this widespread. Personally, I cannot wait for Zone B to fulfill its purpose.

And then the question. What about China? And now we see some sunshine, although it is a muted and a nuanced response but there is no failure to respond, every time!

A quote from our own Larchmonter445:

“The Chinese are learning a lesson that reality is what is shot at you by your enemies. They see how Russia was set up for destruction using Ukraine with NATO. It brings them back to Belgrade ’99 and the bombing of their embassy.

Russia just got the emotional support of a billion four hundred million souls.

I bet if Russia needed volunteers and they put out a call, 10 million Chinese would be there in a day.

The Double Helix has history. Korean War. WWII. Harbin. Unit 731. Chinese and Russians were both used for Jap medical experiments and tortured together.

It’s not all just recent alignment and coordination and cooperation.

This human cohesion against the Hegemon is deep. Visceral. Existential.”

China’s action works like this:

A tranche of sanctions are announced. Vehicles, phones and whatever.

China publishes:

Chinese firms see opportunity in cars, smartphones in Russia after Western exit

Western Reaction:

Insane and stupid sanctions are announced

China publishes:

New ‘sanctions’ against Russian cats shocks Chinese netizens, trending top on social media

Western Reaction:

Sanctions Phase 4 is announced by the EU

China publishes:

Western sanctions only create more problems for the global economy

Western Reaction:

Russia gets nailed by a cyber war

China publishes:

Exclusive: US NSA launches cyberattacks against China for a decade, making citizens’ privacy ‘run naked’

Western Reaction:

Biden or some western EU stooge makes a speech

China publishes:

The US tries hard to hijack world’s view on Russia, but more countries are not buying it

Western Reaction:

Certain Russian banks are cut from SWIFT

China publishes Russian comments:

For citizens, this will be a problem only for those whose purchases and whose lives are most connected with currency, like in dollars and euros, in their consumption. The main part of the population that purchases Russian goods from the Russian markets, using Russian currency or Russian cards (ie., normal people), will not experience any significant threats to their standard of living and quality over the next few months.

China publishes:

Unilateral actions violate China-U.S. trade deal and WTO principles

In addition and it is not very visible, there is a soft process happening around China. It is the same process as what we’ve seen with Russia. The west is trying the same thing but with lesser noise.

Western Reaction:

Biden sends former Trump officials to Taiwan

China publishes:

It is to ‘offset Pompeo’ and pacify DPP.

Western Reaction:

Japan talks about hosting US nuclear arms

China publishes:

Beijing urges Tokyo to ‘deeply reflect on its history’

And so we can see the response of China to each move that the Seppuku Sanctions crowd makes. Take a look at this image.  Please do so, I cannot load this on the blog.  The title is Aggressive Expansion.   Please take a good look and you will know for sure that China understands the issues exactly correctly.

Aggressive Expansion

Do you still feel conflicted? Do you still not know that this is another attempted Russia Rape?

Russian MFA: “The EU’s (…) unilateral restrictions, (…) incompatible with international law, are not directed against the Russian people. Brussels officials (…) are saying openly they intend to inflict the maximum possible damage (…) “suppress Russia’s economic growth.”

A few more images from China.

And the Canadian Embassy in Beijing put up “We support Ukraine” sign in Chinese. Few hrs later…

The humor in China is noticeable and there is not one Chinese source that I follow, that is not clearly with Russia.

But it is different, as this time Russia will not be raped. The Ukrainian actions may be the first move and action may not stay there. In fact, I believe action will not stay there, as it was very well described by Putin and Xi Jinping, in their political manifesto. The world simply cannot continue with a small part of it Raping the Rest, because this small part is unable to support themselves without aggression and looting. Western countries have begun the process of destroying their own economies’ – Russian FM spox

Russia may be planning to confiscate western assets inside Russia and convert them to Russian assets to balance the theft. Intellectual property has major value.

Many of us are despairing as Russian news and Russian information is being sanctioned and suppressed in the free west. So, where do we get Russian news? The answer is: From the Chinese Russian News Store. Every major Chinese publication has Russia / Ukraine round-the-clock coverage.

Expectations

My expectation is that we may see the UN in its current form, just collapse. If this august body can simply ban diplomats against all norms of agreement and international law, why should it exist in its current form in its current location?

My further expectation is that Russia will be just fine economically. They’ve prepared for this. Many banks issued credit cards are inter-operable with the Chinese system. Russia says clearly that they will use the other mechanisms that were developed exactly for this. The sanctions are a massive pretense and an overreach of major proportions. They will all lead to a further de-dollarization.

Russia (along with the other BRICS nations) has an incentive to introduce a global digital currency that can be used anywhere (to export energy for example). The West has an incentive to introduce CBDCs at the national level that can only be used within a given economic zone.

This will form part of the multipolar war.

A further expectation is that these sanctions (from hell) will speed up both de-dollarization and a complete economic collapse of the west. They can do their reset. Nobody else is interested. The sanctions don’t work. They have massive carve outs with Big Headlines but in the fine print, they say: We don’t really mean that because they exclude the important things from the sanctions like gas, like oil, metals and Coca Cola.

Russian MFA: “The EU’s (…) unilateral restrictions, (…) incompatible with international law, are not directed against the Russian people. Brussels officials (…) are saying openly they intend to inflict the maximum possible damage (…) “suppress Russia’s economic growth.”

And then one can only chuckle and say, Russia singlehandedly shut down the green agenda. https://www.rt.com/business/550968-baltic-pipe-construction-resumed/

Welcome to the first skirmish in the move to human multi-polarity.

In one fell swoop, Russia just made the Russian Ruble the single most stable currency in the entire world.  

Moreover, they just fucked the US Dollar and the EURO so badly, neither currency is likely to survive.

Nobody around the world will favor a US dollar, backed by nothing, from a nation $30 TRILLION in debt, versus a gold-backed Ruble.

Russia Prevents Washington from Unleashing Biological Warfare

From HERE

In view of the unrest that US intelligence services have been actively initiating lately, whether in Central Asia, Transcaucasia or other areas bordering Russia and China, the risk of a biological disaster from multiple secret military biological laboratories deployed by the US in potentially politically and socially unstable regions is objectively increasing. In this regard, the issue of the US preparing a biological time bomb in Kazakhstan has been raised many times before. The growing risk of the Pentagon initiating biological warfare using over 400 US biological laboratories located overseas around the world and the need for a clear response to the risk of worldwide biological disaster from such secret US overseas facilities has been repeatedly pointed out.  After all, these biological laboratories employ some 13,000 “employees” who are busy creating strains of killer pathogens (microbes and viruses) that are resistant to vaccines.

It is no secret nowadays that the US has set up such biological laboratories in 25 countries around the world: in the Middle East, Africa, South-East Asia. Only within the former Soviet Union there are US military biological laboratories in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Uzbekistan.

The Americans try to deny the military nature of the studies conducted in such laboratories. However, the secrecy that surrounds them is only comparable to that of the most important military facilities. There is no accountability to the local and global public about the “work” being done there. Moreover, no scientific “achievements” have been publicly demonstrated by American biologists over the many years of the existence of such foreign secret laboratories, and the results of their research are not published anywhere in the public domain.  Meanwhile, laboratories are actively collecting information on the gene pool of the populations of countries where such laboratories operate. All this indicates that the Pentagon is undoubtedly preparing to wage a biological war using biological weapons, which the US is building in such biological laboratories. It is well known that the US has already spent over $100bn in recent years developing biological warfare weapons. The US is the only country that still blocks the establishment of a verification mechanism under the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.

However, like Russia’s demands to the West for a clear agreement on universal security measures and on the non-proliferation of NATO to the east, warnings about US readiness to unleash a global biological war have never been heeded in Washington and Western capitals.

With this in mind, one can hardly deny that Russia, like any other country, does not wish to have such weapons near its borders, thus jeopardizing the security of all.

Therefore, in Moscow’s military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine in recent days, getting rid of the numerous US military biological laboratories on the territory of that country is an important point.

On February 24, the British conservative publication THE EXPOSÉ published an article entitled “Is there more to the Ukraine/Russia conflict than meets the eye?” It recognizes that Russia should have conducted the current military operation on the basis of its security interests and confirms that there has long been a very serious threat to the lives and health of the Russian Federation population from the territory of Ukraine. It refers to at least 16 US military biological laboratories located in Odessa, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkiv, Kiev (also three), Kherson, Ternopil, Dnepropetrovsk, as well as near Luhansk and the border with Crimea. Such “cooperation” between the Pentagon and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health dates back to 2005. Opposition parties managed to push through the Verkhovna Rada in 2013 to end this “cooperation”, but the US-led coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 prevented the implementation of this decision, resulting in this “cooperation” not only continuing but also actively developing at the initiative of Washington.

Many of the Pentagon’s and White House’s official secrets about US clandestine biological laboratories overseas have been revealed by Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign (USA) and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 (BWATA). As this American scientist points out, “We now have an Offensive Biological Weapons industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989”. According to Boyle, “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda …. to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the the Pentagon and the C.I.A. into death science”. He cites as an example the group of Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, which managed to increase the toxicity of the flu virus by a factor of 200. According to Boyle, the Pentagon and the CIA are “ready, willing and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests… They have a stockpile of that super-weapons-grade anthrax that they already used against us in October 2001”.

The threat to people living even at a distance from such laboratories is evidenced by an investigation conducted by USA Today newspaper, which showed that from 2006 to 2013 alone, more than 1,500 accidents and safety violations occurred in 200 military biological laboratories on the territory of the US. So what about possible similar incidents in biological laboratories in Ukraine or other former Soviet republics?

In the summer of 2019, “America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility,” reported Britain’s The Independent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the public health authority in the US, has revoked the military bioresearch center at Fort Detrick’s license to handle Ebola, smallpox and anthrax after CDC inspectors found “problems with the procedures used to decontaminate wastewater” at Fort Detrick. In this regard, it is notable that the possibility of “deadly viruses and pathogens” leaking into Fort Detrick’s wastewater was detected shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, which the Americans were quick to blame on China. It is also noteworthy that the Pentagon has significantly stepped up the activities of its overseas biological laboratories since 2019, clearly shifting the “work” on particularly dangerous strains and biological weapons development there.

In these circumstances, the task of terminating the activities of the US secret biological laboratories as part of the demilitarization of that country is justified in the program of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.

Against this background, it is noteworthy that the US embassy in Ukraine removed all documents about the biological laboratories in Kiev and Odessa from its official website after Moscow launched its military operation. This further confirms that in addition to the nuclear threat from Zelensky, Russia was also being prepared for bio-extinction behind the ocean. Under these circumstances, the announcement by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) on the US government procurement website last October of an addendum on “combating highly dangerous pathogens” is understandable. This document concerned the $3.6mln finishing work to launch two biological laboratories in Ukraine – in Kiev and Odessa, where machinery, equipment and personnel were already being prepared for the United States to unleash a biological war under the cover of Ukraine.