BIDEN’S INTELLIGENCE WAS GOOD

So, the answer to the question posed by the Russian propagandists today - “Is this war?” - is YES.

And now we know that all the US intelligence that the American Far Right and Far Left (who prove with this that politics are circular, not linear) was doing their best to belittle and debunk, was right.

Let’s review:

Back in late January, the White House stated that Russia would stage false flag attacks, including blowing up its own supporters in the Donbas, to create a pretext for an invasion. (It wasn’t that hard to predict; when Putin went to war in Chechnya, he ordered agents of the FSB to blow up an apartment building in Moscow - WITH PEOPLE IN IT - to blame on the Chechnyans and give him his casus belli.) Yesterday, Bellingcat, an organization of open-source detectives who have exposed Russian activity in the area in since 2014, said evidence pointed to the conclusion that the Donbas kindergarten had been shelled by Russian-backed forces, not the Ukrainian army.

The week before last, the administration claimed the Russian government would create a fake “graphic video” to justify an invasion of Ukraine. Today, the Kremlin-owned Channel One showed video in its nightly newscast of what it said was - without providing any evidence to verfiy the claim - a firefight between “Ukrainian saboteurs” and Ukrainian (i.e., Moscow- backed) separatists, stating this was collected from a camera the “saboteurs” lost in the battle.

In his speech to the U.N. Security Council yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that a Russian false flag operation would involve a chemical attack. In the video referenced above, Channel One claimed the “Ukrainian saboteurs” were on their way to blow up a chlorine plant in the Donbas.

Last Friday night, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said a Russian invasion could occur before the end of the Olympic Games, despite “leaks” (i.e. Russian disinformation) that Putin had promised Xi Jinping that this would not happen. One week later...

After the leak of U.S. intelligence that the Russian invasion would come on Wednesday, February 16, Russian state media ridiculed the statement as Wednesday came and went without an invasion. Then, today, metadata evidence emerged that the urgent addresses by the heads of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) urging their citizens to evacuate or take up arms... had been taped on Wednesday.

And now the news...

If you aren’t aware of it, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was expelled from the country last night.

Russian State media announced today that Putin and Belorussian dictator Lukashenko would personally oversee military exercises that would include the firing of ballistic and cruise missiles on Saturday.

Both the DPR and the LPR, which Western media call “breakaway” provinces of Ukraine, rather than “territory seized by Russia in 2014" which is what they are, encouraged men of fighting age to take up arms to defend their land. After that, air raid sirens wailed in Donetsk, and a traffic jam quickly formed on the road to the Russian border, as did long lines at gas stations. When an orphanage in Donetsk was evacuated, crowds of cameras and friendly journalists magically appeared to film the children as they boarded buses that lined up to take local residents to Russia, which promised to give these refugees 10,000 rubles ($130) each.

There is a strong similarity to this event and the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

We can start with the FSB setting off bombs in the Moscow apartment building with the intention of killing innocent residents to build up support for the invasion.

In 2008, it was South Ossetia and Abkhazia that needed Russian “rescuing.” Today it’s Luhansk and Donetsk.

In 2008, when the West became concerned with Russian deployments on the border with Georgia, the Kremlin said eight days before the invasion that they were withdrawing troops. This week, the Russian government released video of tanks on flatcars and truck convoys as evidence troops were going home, only to have Western intelligence counter that claim, saying the Kremlin had actually added troops to the area.

In 2008, the justification Russia gave for its invasion was Georgian shelling of separatists in South Ossetia, then home to all the freshly-minted Russian “citizens” the Russians had handed out passports to that simply had to be protected. Over the past month, 600,000 Russian passports were passed out among the 2.2 million Ukrainians living in the breakaway regions. Now Russian wants to come to the aid of its newest citizens. Speaker of the Russian Parliament Vyacheslav Volodin said today “Russia doesn’t want war, but if the threat to Russian citizens and countrymen arises, our country will come to their defense.”

When Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian Army had been badly beaten by a rag-tag group of insurgents in Chechnya in 1996. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Red Army had been impoverished, decimated, and weakened, by corruption and a bankrupt government.

For Putin, this was part of the humiliation of Russia following the end of the Cold War, He sees it as his historic mission to rebuild Russia, and has spent the past 20 years rebuilding the Russian army into the dreaded force it once was, expanding and modernizing it - most particularly its vast nuclear arsenal. Now, 20 years and various military adventures in Syria, Ukraine, and Georgia, Putin is this crisis to show the world just how advanced, capable, and frightening the Russian army is once again.

The next 24 to 48 hours will determine whether this becomes the full-scale, mass-casualty war the Biden administration has been warning about, or a more limited military action. Both will be horrible.

Right now, anyone who claims what is happening is “none of our business” is as Pro-Putin as Charles Lindbergh was Pro-Hitler with the America First Committee in and the CPUSA was in denouncing the West following the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939-41.

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