What don’t they want us to see?
One of the problems you face in trying to discern what’s going on in Ukraine is the almost complete black-out of facts on the ground. We’re simply not getting much information, and while we get reports of things that happen, many times, too frequently in fact, these reports are later debunked or revised in such a way as to make what’s really going on very murky and unintelligible. On Wednesday, there was a report of a maternity ward in a hospital being struck by the Russians. I’ve heard no follow-up reports, but I don’t consider the story factual until I see some sort of confirmation that it’s real. We’ve all been burned too many times already in this conflict, by ridiculous fake news, almost all of it either for the Ukrainians, or against the Russians. “Snake Island,” “Ghost of Kiev,” “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo,” “radiation leaks,” and on and on. The number of false stories coming out of this conflict, combined with the complete lack of solid information on casualty counts on either side suggests a number of things to me, and all of it is that the gas-lighting is on an epic scale. There’s no truth in any of this. On Wednesday, Bongino referred to the problem as a “Crisis of Truth.” It’s worse than that. We have a crisis of facts, due to a stunning lack of them. Do we know the truth? No. Can we know the truth? I don’t know, and I don’t believe anybody else in the West can tell you otherwise. I’m going to tell you what I think is happening, and what may happen. I’m also going to tell you why I think it’s happening. These are not facts, but they are educated guesses based on the slim facts we have.
Russia is grinding it out. Things are not going easily for Russia, but unless something else changes markedly, they’re going to defeat the Ukrainians. The invaders have all the material, manpower, and technological advantages. Even Ukraine’s planes are aging Russian models. Russia largely controls the avenues of approach into Ukraine, except in the most extreme West of the country, but again, the ability to move any substantial amount of supplies or war materials into Ukraine from the West will be severely hampered. Russia clearly controls the areas along the Black Sea coast, so there’s no material by ship that’s going to make it in. Even now, it seems the latest disposition maps I’ve seen suggest that Russia is slowly encircling the major cities, and the area East of the Dnieper River seems to be almost entirely in Russian control. Since this region is a majority-Russian-speaking populace, it seems as though Putin may have an increasingly firmer grip. In the far North, we know Putin already shares control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant site with the Ukrainians, just as he does now at the large power plant in the center of the country, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, located on the Dnieper River.
From the Russian perspective, securing the nuclear sites makes a good deal of sense. Preventing saboteurs from turning nuclear plants into gargantuan dirty bombs is an important task any invader would be likely to undertake. One would also expect that if the invaders intended to restore normalcy to an area after pacifying an area, they wouldn’t want to wreck the entire electric infrastructure. Reports from other areas in the country likewise suggest that the Russian forces may be avoiding unnecessary damage to infrastructure, again suggesting they intend to restore normalcy quickly rather than over decades. This very much flies in the face of the narrative that Putin is a mad-dog wild-man intent upon razing Ukraine utterly to the ground.
Reports now suggest that upwards of two million Ukrainians have fled the country, most for refuge in Poland. Ukraine forces are under-equipped, and highly demoralized. Worse, some portion of their forces may have been encircled or nearly encircled in the Eastern section of the country. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are fighting a defensive war, which means they have the advantage on the turf they still hold.
The issue that came to a head on Wednesday is the matter of biolabs in Ukraine. There had been a fair amount of rumor-mill level information circulating around the Internet that suggested there were bio-warfare labs in Ukraine, and that Putin was going after them. Let me try to clear the air on this, since certain conservative hosts seem not to grasp any of this material, while others at least recognize the implications: If there are bio-labs in Ukraine that have been handling dangerous pathogens, then Putin will certainly be able to make the claim, a la “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that he had a right to pre-emptively attack Ukraine to reduce/eliminate the threat. What could the United States possibly say in opposition? “But Bruh, we’re the good guys…”
There are those who have claimed, on behalf of the US government, that these labs are of a defensive purpose only, but let me be more honest: If you have the sort of research labs that’s handling Anthrax, you can just as easily weaponize your research products as not. More, there’s information that one of the labs was collecting genetic material in which they were seeking only white Russian RNA for experimentation. Why would a lab in Ukraine do that? That doesn’t sound innocent at all, and once you realize that the US Department of Defense was involved, one can’t understate the potentially diabolical nature of such research. The fact that Victoria Nuland claims they’re now concerned about the disposition of the labs, and imputing a Russian offensive intent to capturing the labs suggests to me there’s something nefarious that has been going on in Ukraine. Fifteen of these labs throughout Ukraine were being funded by DoD to at least some degree. If, and I stress the IF, this turns out to be a collection of real biolabs with weaponization capabilities, then Russia has a legitimate claim that the United States was funding bioweapons on their border, and this would make US the bad guys. I cannot tell you how thoroughly disgusted I am with all of this. These people, who funded the labs with our tax dollars, all of them, each and every one, needs to go to jail if there is any evidence of weaponization and weapons research for several reasons. First, that would violate the 1972/75 Biological Weapons Conventions. Second, it would likely violate US law. Third, it could be seen as an act of war or certainly provocation of one.
The other thing I’ve been hearing reports from Ukraine include the fact that the Ukrainian forces are making combat emplacements among civilian homes and facilities in order to stymie Russian advances, knowing Russia is attempting to avoid civilian casualties. The Russians have been making announcements in some areas, warning civilians to stay out of certain areas in which they intend to attack. If the story of Ukrainian forces sheltering among or placing weapons among civilians turns out to be true, they are guilty of war crimes by using civilians as shields.
As for the role of the United States in the overall crisis, the following has become undeniably clear:
- They don’t want to stop Putin yet…They may be looking for an opportunity to set-up Putin with a nuclear, biological, or chemical false flag
- They will not provide Ukraine any significant weapons of self-defense
- They’re happy to try to goad other NATO members into stepping into provocative territory
- They want Putin gone, but they still need his help with the Iran deal
- If they can’t control Zelenskiy themselves, they’ll happily cut him loose to the fate Russians have in store, if they don’t whack him themselves
One of the other things that’s really beginning to cause my eyebrows to raise is the lack of statistical data on the dead and wounded. We received reports of incidents here and there, but isn’t it odd that the same media that kept a ticker on dead Americans in Iraq, and deaths and infections from COVID (but only while Trump was in office,) are suddenly disinterested in the statistics? One would think that if it’s all as brutal as we’ve been told, there’d be some sort of, dare I say it, “body count” for either side. Instead, there’s nothing of the sort. Given all the coverage of wars I’ve witnessed going all the way back to Vietnam, blaring announcers in grave voices stating the hard and ugly results of war in numerical terms has been a feature for as long as I can remember, until now. Why should today be different, suddenly? They ordinarily use these statistics to horrify us and to turn us against whichever war is being prosecuted at the time. Why are they treating Ukraine differently? It’s not that I’m a ghoul, but one of the unmistakable evidences of war is the grim reality of the wounded and the dead, and media has been only too willing to show them to us in the past. I find it highly suspicious that we’re not being shown any of that in the war today.
More and more, as I listen to the coverage, I’ve come to wonder if we’re even given enough information to discern the truth on our own. Ordinarily, the media gives us just enough to be able to figure out what’s going on, even if they lie entirely about an event’s actual meaning, as is their custom. Now, we get none of this. We get grainy footage, blurred by motion, or static pictures in which nothing is going on, and at most, we’re looking at an aftermath of something, but what happened there and who did it is obscured by time. What we don’t get is any live footage of ongoing combat. The closest we get is something like an artillery piece, or other long-range or indirect fire weapon firing, with no context about where it’s occurring or what the target of the artillery fire might be. Where are the media embeds with their satellite up-links? In the modern context, this “coverage” simply isn’t. They’ve also cut off all Russian media, so there’s no counterpoint of any kind, and no real-time footage coming from them either. The lack of video of the fighting give me the same feeling I had in the wake of January 6th when the Capitol Police would release little camera footage from among the 14,000 hours they had captured. Why would you conceal it?
On the Ukrainian side of things, we now have the spectacle of President Zelenskiy accusing the West of doing nothing, which in some ways is definitely true, but what is galling to me is his demands that the West come to his aid. Here is the spectacle of a beggar waving his fist at those he would have provide him charity. When asked about the danger of escalation, he remarks that any such dangers are unknown or unknowable, and with that, we should simply ignore the risk. At least for me, there’s something offensive about a country’s leader telling Americans that they’re to blame, and that he’s not worried about the blowback from any escalation on our country. It’s just a little bit galling. We’ve already provided much more support over the years than I would have approved, had I been given a choice. (Of course, that sentiment applies to many more nations than Ukraine.) Here’s video from an interview by Sky News:
The accusations flying back and forth over the biolabs situation has not abated, and Psaki issued a blanket denial of US involvement in bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and called Russian and Chinese accusations of this “conspiracy theories.’ When Jen Psaki says a narrative is a “conspiracy theory,” you can be virtually certain that the opposite is true:
We took note of Russia’s false claims about alleged U.S. biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine. We’ve also seen Chinese officials echo these conspiracy theories.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) March 9, 2022
I think this is made plain, at least in part, by Victoria Nuland’s own remarks to Senator Rubio on Tuesday. I’ll re-post the video here:
Notice that Nuland says there are concerns that these biological materials could fall into Russian hands? Why would there be concern if there’s nothing dangerous there, as Psaki later claimed?
The question for Americans is rightly: Who’s lying? It’s not a question any longer of whether you’re being fed lies. The question is: Among all the liars involved, which of them is currently lying to you? Maybe all of them are liars to some degree. We can’t know, but the very fact that we need to speculate underlines the problem. I don’t trust any of these people. As I covered earlier, people I’ve trusted for a long time are now unreliable. From the point of view of somebody covering this story, it’s a catastrophe. There’s no way to know anything with certainty, and at least for the moment, it’s being kept that way. This crisis of facts is the underpinning of Bongino’s “Crisis of Truth,” and I see no evidence of the crisis relenting.
