#Opinion

On the threshold of changes

By Oleg Karpovich and Mikhail Troyansky Pro-Rectors at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy

From the first minute, the information war accompanying the Russian Federation’s special military operation in Ukraine has bred distorted and far-fetched interpretations of the Russian party’s goals and motives, with global media outlets, particularly the Western media, circulating them. For many months and even years, Moscow tried to inform the international public at large about the real-life situation and Russia’s concerns. However, these attempts were deliberately ignored. Efforts to demonise Russia have become ridiculous in the past few days, with the aim of replacing the facts of the matter with emotions and propaganda clichés.

So, what was the real cause of the special military operation?

First of all, the crisis around Donbass exacerbated the situation. For many years, Kiev brought this crisis to a boiling point by sabotaging the Minsk agreements <...> Western countries, including France and Germany, ignored Kiev’s ostentatious reluctance to follow in the wake of the peace process, year after year. <...> Moreover, Kiev beefed up its military potential along the line of contact to the maximum possible extent.

Second, throughout Ukraine, and especially in the country’s southeastern areas, the Ukrainian authorities implemented their official line aimed at oppressing the Russian-speaking population and any opponents of the country’s linguistic and ideological unification. In 2014, dozens of activists from pro-Russian movements were eliminated in Kharkov, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and some other cities. <...>

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The Ukrainian authorities had every opportunity to prevent a dramatic scenario, fraught with the sufferings of civilians, but they chose the road of confrontation. This confrontation must end as soon as possible, and this is now the only condition for de-escalating the protracted and explosive crisis around Ukraine.

🎙 #Opinion by María Zakharova:

BioBiden

We can get a rough idea of the US political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in Ukraine if we rely on open sources as well as leaked documents. Below is an attempt to reconstruct the chronology of this involvement, though not a comprehensive one. There are many gaps in this truly diabolical plan that are still to be filled.

1991 – the US launches the Nunn-Lugar programme for the former Soviet countries to control/eliminate Soviet weapons of mass destruction including bioweapons. The Pentagon's Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) was named as the programme’s main executor.
1993 – the Ukraine-US Agreement on the Prevention of Proliferation of WMD is signed.
2005 – an additional protocol is signed to the agreement between the Ukrainian Health Ministry and the DTRA on the prevention of the proliferation of technologies, pathogens and know-how that can be used to develop bioweapons. This is the start of the transfer of the Ukrainian military biological potential into US specialists' hands.

2000s – large US military-industrial companies are engaged in military biological activity in Ukraine.
2005-2014 – Black & Veatch Special Projects, a DTRA contractor, builds and upgrades 8 biolabs in Ukraine instead of eliminating military biological infrastructure, as was originally claimed. One of the facilities, a biolab in Odessa, has been financed since 2011 for the study of “pathogens that can be used in bioterrorism attacks.”

2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently - Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
2009 – Rosemont Seneca Partners is established by former US Secretary of State John Kerry’ stepson Christopher Heinz and incumbent US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
2014 – anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Ukraine.
2014 – Hunter Biden joins the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
2014 - Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to "assert Ukraine's cultural & economic independence from Russia".
2014 - Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed "science project in Ukraine".
2014 - Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
2014-2016 - Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
2016 – US citizen Ulana Nadia Suprun, a descendant of Ukrainian Nazis, is appointed Acting Health Minister of Ukraine. The US DoD and Ukraine’s Health Ministry cooperation programme is greatly expanded.
2016 – an outbreak of swine flu among Ukrainian Defence Ministry personnel guarding a biolab in Kharkov, Ukraine; 20 dead. The incident is hushed up.
2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.
2016 – the DTRA and Ukraine’s Health Ministry extend the contract after getting approval from the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.
2019 – the COVID-19 mutated bat coronavirus pandemic begins with an outbreak in Wuhan.
February 24, 2022 – launch of the Russian Army’s special operation in Ukraine.
February 24-25, 2022 – rapid elimination of strains in biolabs in Ukraine.
March 8, 2022 – US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly acknowledges the existence of cooperation between the US and Ukraine in pathogens.

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova

Medvedchuk’s spouse Oksana Marchenko appealed to the British government and people: “I appeal to the relatives and friends of Aiden Eslin and Shaun Pinner: Angela Eslin, Nathan and Shannon Wood, Derby and Evan Pinner. It's in your power to ask the Prime Minister of your country, Boris Johnson, to influence the Ukrainian leadership and achieve the release of Aiden and Sean by exchanging them for the Ukrainian opposition politician detained by the Kiev authorities, my husband Viktor Medvedchuk.”

💬 Maria Zakharova: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who recently went to Kiev, must be aware of the developments with Her Majesty’s subjects. He is sure to reply, isn’t he?

Meanwhile, Liz Truss might take the opportunity to reveal what exactly the British nationals were doing there [in Mariupol, with Neo-Nazis] anyway.

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova

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Key points

🔹 The report published by the Russian Ministry of Defence today clearly proves that Washington, in close coordination with its NATO partners, has reached the final stage of setting up provocations in Ukraine aimed at convincing the international community that “Russia has been using weapons-grade poisonous substances and biological agents.”

🔹 Their rationale is obvious: the shocking details of the illegal cooperation between the United States and the Ukrainian administration which still remains in power in making bacteriological weapons have been revealed to the world. The realisation that their criminal activities would inevitably be exposed was so patently clear that Washington began to prepare in advance:

👉 Shaped public opinion
👉 Picked the contractors
👉 Worked to influence international organisations

🔹 The Americans and their partners in Europe take no notice of the fact that Russia has had no chemical weapons at all for five years – since September 27, 2017, and this has been verified by the OPCW. The Ukrainians, aided by NATO specialists, are to remedy this flaw in the American plans crudely enough: just as corrupt police officers plant a weapon with prints on an innocent suspect, Washington and Kiev are going to plant chemical weapons at the Russian Armed Forces’ positions in Ukraine.

👉 This is more than serious. Clearly, the original US plan was to step up economic pressure on Russia to make it reconsider its legitimate security interests. That didn’t work. Now the US is going to use WMD; in fact, this is a game that crosses the red line. If this happens, the number of victims will be incalculable. Each of them will be on the conscience of the American strategists sitting in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, and on the conscience of their puppets in Kiev, if they still have any left.

💬 #Zaharova: “ABD ve diğer Batılı ülkeler, dünya sahnesindeki ayrıcalıklı konumlarından vazgeçmeye hazır değiller ve uluslararası ilişkilerin demokratikleşme sürecini durdurmaya veya yavaşlatmaya çalışıyorlar”

https://t.iss.one/MFARussia/12390

#Opinion by Russian MFA Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova

Nuclear DisInfo (Read in full)

Mechanisms for information attacks with a new thesis that target the public space have been launched in the West at the highest level in a transboundary and trans-format manner. The premise is primitive and completely horrifying: the Russians are threatening a nuclear war, and the Russians are waving the nuclear stick.

⁉️ Do I even need to say that this thesis is absolutely incorrect and false? Apparently, I do.

They are pushing this exact thesis because it plays on basic human fears, the experience of the older generation, which throughout the second half of the 20th century was bracing for the Third World War against global communism, and Western youth, for which their respective governments have come up with a new mechanism called “cancel culture” (cancelling everything Russian this time). Moreover, the West absolutely does not care what Moscow really says, and the meaning of words is distorted and outwardly perverted.

Let’s consider the specifics.

Two days ago, in his answer to a question by Dimitri Simes during an interview, Sergey Lavrov said literally the following 👉 full quote

What are the takeaways?

1. It was Russia that, with great difficulty, convinced the United States during lengthy talks to reaffirm the Gorbachev-Reagan formula that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

2. It was Russia that persuaded the group of five nuclear nations to adopt a statement with the same content.

3. There are risks; they should not be blown out of proportion or underestimated.

We did everything possible to prevent a nuclear war, to create all the necessary obstacles on the way to slipping into this scenario (fortunately, they justified themselves during the Cold War and are working today), because we understand the real risks and threats posed by irresponsible behaviour in this area. We cannot allow the very thought of a nuclear war.

Now acting in the worst traditions of disinformation, Western officials are feeding the media, in a coordinated effort, fake news about Moscow’s alleged nuclear threats. The foreign ministries from the NATO countries started convincing the people in their countries that the Russians were “rattling their weapons.”

<...>

Notice how clumsy this was in terms of media work. First, all the put-up quotes against our country were repeated by the journalist, and then they were again mentioned by Ned Price. A presentation designed for a not too sophisticated public. No one even paid attention to what the Foreign Minister said about the risks and Russia’s attempts to prevent the unthinkable.

It’s unthinkable to us, but, mindful of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is, unfortunately, possible for our colleagues from overseas.

The next day, the media started mass brainwashing. The British tabloids (the Daily Mail and others) and the high-quality analytical US press, French television and German tabloid magazines started talking with one voice that Moscow was threatening with a Third World Nuclear War. And this was already being discussed in Europe; French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said that the Russian Foreign Minister’s words were the “rhetoric of intimidation.”

I would like to ask this Frenchman whether he at least saw what Sergey Lavrov said? We have translated the interview.

Our country is against any nuclear war, and this is exactly what the Russian Minister said, and this is what guides our diplomacy in its work.

Could it be that the Western capitals read the interviews as presented by the Western media? This is the only thing that can justify their words. To avoid that, one should simply DON'T turn off alternative sources of information, and listen to what Russia has to say close to the original text, rather than as interpreted by your media under NATO guidelines.

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova

💬 The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) posted a consolidated list of grain production data for the 2021/2022 season on its website.

The figures provided by experts show that according to the 2021/2022 agricultural year results, the global grain production is expected to reach 2.8 billion tonnes, which is more than in the 2019/2020 season. The grain carryover will amount to a record high of 850 million tonnes (much higher than last year). According to the results of the current agricultural year, the stocks-to-use ratio will amount to 30.5 percent, which is above average as well.

That means there will be more grain in the world.

Now, let's take a look at the trade transaction data. Anticipated grain trade volumes are higher than in the 2019/2020 season at 439.2 million tonnes. Separate data for wheat are available. The physical level of stocks and the volume of trade in this commodity will increase to 192 million tonnes (up by 1.5 percent compared to the previous period). Similar dynamics are anticipated in feed grain and rice production and trade.

Here's why this is important.

Representatives of the West are using every platform, including the UN, to accuse Russia of reducing the amount of grain available on the market through its actions, allegedly throwing a wrench in grain operations which, according to the West, has sent prices for wheat and other grains up.

In reality, though, there’s more grain on the market than in previous years, and trade is up as well.

It turns out that the price (which is growing, indeed) is not growing because of Russia's actions. The cause of that is a separate matter, and experts are coming up with different explanations.

However, general conclusions can be drawn:
1. Systematic errors made by the West when making forecasts for its agricultural policy.
2. Global inflation caused by short-sighted financial and monetary mechanisms that the West used during the pandemic.
3. The ill-conceived transition of Europe and North America to green energy based on the forced introduction of bio fuel technologies.
4. Illegitimate sanctions that have disrupted the established commodity-money chains.

With regard to whether famine is a realistic scenario, experts increasingly foresee a pessimistic outcome. They believe that many nations will be impacted and even more will become destitute.

The Western regimes that instigate and cause destruction should be blamed for that.

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova

💬 The UK recently blocked the webcast of the Arria-Formula Meeting at the UN Security Council. The meeting was expanded on Russia’s measures to evacuate children from the conflict zone.

This is yet another demonstration of blatant censorship by London – and that’s not all.

When London’s official representatives or their metropolitan neighbours talk obvious nonsense and tell lies, similar to Colin Powell’s infamous vial, fake stories by the White Helmets or the Skripal case, no one makes any attempt to block the streaming of the Security Council or Arria-Formula Meetings. What about freedom of expression and opinion which the West claims to vehemently support?

But UK officials think otherwise, claiming a UN platform should not be used to spread disinformation. But who found this undelivered report to be fake?

❗️ You might say this is absurd, but I say this is typical of them, a behaviour rooted in many years of impunity.