West Ignores Russia’s Threats

Since February 26, 2022, after the Special Military Operation started, with Russia invading the Donbass region of Ukraine, Russia’s nuclear launches are on high alert. According to TheConversation, “Russian president Vladimir Putin overnight ordered the defense minister and the chief of the military to put nuclear deterrent forces in a ‘special regime of combat duty’–possibly referring to readying its tactical nuclear forces.”

Actually from 2014 onwards through the end of December 2021, the Russian government offered international negotiations to communicate their concerns about NATO expansionism in surrounding Western nations. Up till early April 2022 there were peace talks between the two presidents. However after visits by Western politicians to Kiev, the peace talks stalled. It appears that the Ukrainian government has submitted to serving as a willing tool for the Western agenda of conquest, while their leader serves as a conduit for armaments.

Since autumn of 2022, especially after the Nordstream sabotage and more open war-mongering, Russia’s threats of using nuclear strikes is taking shape. Germany’s approval for sending the Leopard 2 tanks is for Russia a stark reminder of the horrors fighting the German Nazis during World War II. Both the Leopard 2 and U.S. infantry fighting vehicles (such as Bradley or Marder) can also accommodate use of depleted-uranium (DU) tipped bullets.

Since December 2022, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and current deputy chair of the country’s Security Council, has been using the press to deliver brooding thoughts and tigerish-growls.

In the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper [translated] he muses that only nuclear deterrence is preventing an all-out attack. But in any case, Russia’s nuclear strike-back will not leave time for the West to argue whether it was retaliatory or preventive. His view appears to be that eventually the West will not be able to restrain itself.

“The only thing that stops our enemies today is the understanding that Russia will be guided by [the doctrine] on nuclear deterrence. And if there is a real threat, we will act…Therefore, the Western world is balancing between a burning desire to maximally humiliate, dismember and destroy Russia, on the one hand, and the desire to avoid a nuclear apocalypse, on the other.”

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russia President

After the WEF summit in mid-January 2023, more munitions and tanks and infantry fighting vehicles were promised for Ukraine whether from Germany, U.S., France, or the U.K. Evidently Poland, an active NATO country, is being used as a launch base for re-exporting tanks, equipment, munitions, contractors, specialists, and helicopters heading for Ukraine. This is how the war is incrementally becoming full-blown. The ability to discern among the tanks and munitions being re-exported through Poland to Ukraine will frustrate even the Russians.

How easy will it to be to tell whether or when DU-laden tanks or armor or munitions are being used?

Dmitry Medvedev has advised the West of its nuclear deterrance doctrine in an article explaining that the

“Russian military doctrine allows the use of such weapons of ultimate resort either in retaliation for an attack against Russia or its allies with weapons of mass destruction, or during a conventional conflict that puts the Russian statehood at significant risk.”

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russia President

President Putin recently hinted that the Russian retaliatory-strike doctrine may need to be changed to a more pre-emptive-strike doctrine. He explained what that doctrine currently is to a journalist at a working meeting with the press on December 9, 2022.

“The United States has a theory and even practice. They have the concept of a preventive strike in their strategy and other policy documents. We do not. Our strategy talks about a retaliatory strike. There are no secrets whatsoever. What is a retaliatory strike? That is a response strike. It is when our early warning system, the missile attack warning system, detects missiles launched toward Russian Federation territory. First, it detects the launches, and then response actions begin…After the early warning system receives a signal indicating a missile attack, hundreds of our missiles are launched and they cannot be stopped. But it is still a retaliatory strike. What does that mean? It means that our enemy missile warheads will fall on the territory of the Russian Federation. This cannot be avoided. They will fall anyway. True, nothing will remain of the enemy, because it is impossible to intercept hundreds of missiles. And this is, without a doubt, a potent deterrent.”

Russia President Putin, Press Meeting in Bishkek on December 9, 2022

In today’s world of rapid delivery systems, the time between launch and arrival is under ten minutes. However the reason why Russia is reconsidering its policy is because it considers the use of DU as the use of a ‘dirty nuclear bomb.’ This was the message that Konstantin Gavrilov, envoy of the Russian delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was to deliver [Sputniknews, translation]

“We know that Leopard 2 tanks, as well as Bradley and Marder armored fighting vehicles, can use depleted uranium shells, which can contaminate terrain, just like it happened in Yugoslavia and Iraq…If Kiev were to be supplied with such munitions for the use in western heavy military hardware, we would regard it as the use of ‘dirty nuclear bombs’ against Russia, with all the consequences that entails.”

Konstantin Gavrilov, head of Russian delegation to OSCE Security Forum, January 2023

At the same Forum for Security Cooperation in Vienna on January 25, 2023, Gavrilov also warned that long-range strikes will meet with retaliatory response:

“If Washington and NATO countries provide Kiev with weapons for striking against the cities deep inside the Russian territory and for attempting to seize our constitutionally affirmed territories, it would force Moscow to undertake harsh retaliatory actions. Do not say that we did not warn you.”

Konstantin Gavrilov, head of Russian delegation to Vienna, January 25, 2023

Confirming what Gavrilov said at the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control, previously Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had warned that “any shipments containing weapons for Ukraine would become a lawful target for Russian forces.”

While the U.S. establishment media have downplayed any nuclear security concerns expressed by Russia, the American blogosphere is rife with discussion about DU and the dangers it poses directly to the populace when shells are dropped and the implications in future peace negotiations. As AGN has previously written about Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and fall-out, the dangers include contaminating the water-table, open-water bodies, shells when touched or stored by animals or humans, and open farmland; even tiny amounts of enriched uranium will cause enormous jumps in the number of still births, congenital birth defects, childhood cancers, other autoimmune diseases, and often effecting more than one lifetime.

Today the comparison of the dirty bomb may be made with the recent Norfolk-Southern train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, and the Chernobyl-sized blast cloud when officials foolishly allowed a “controlled release” to help “burn off” the plastic chemicals contained in the railroad cars. Instead hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic plastic chemicals were released over a nearby watershed into the environment, killing fish, and likely causing great harm in the future because of the hundreds of billions of pounds required for dilution. (The chemical engineering student, Nick Drom gives a quick science lesson here.)

Under the Biden administration, with its inadequate moral requirement for priorities for the people, not only have the number of train derailments increased, but legislators and officials deliberately wrote off the concerns of workers in order to break their strikes. Now the carelessness of company owners and federal agencies, which include dismissing signs of overheated hotboxes and cracking railcar axles and gross pollution, have led to this national disaster which they even shamelessly try to cover-up by by censoring media coverage.

(Arguably the Chinese balloon scare is a mass-media distraction away from Nordstream, Pfizer, or the Norfolk-Southern railroad disaster.) WSWS alone has extensively reported on the railroad negotiations allowing railroad companies to downsize the number of conductors and inspectors on trains, allowing for longer trains lengths, depriving workers of benefits, giving a green-light in contracting out repairs for locomotives to nonunion shops, and using remote planning software to downsize the number of railroad employees and maintenance crews needed. What happens illustrates the result of capitalist engineering economics applied to an extreme whereby needed repairs are overlooked—-and callously disregarded.

Ever so typical of the West, today’s political leaders readily endanger the public with little concern other than ensuring that shareholders can continue to afford stock buy-backs. The defense industry machine requires that Congress, the White House, NATO, and the World Economic Forum even continue to dismiss Russia’s threats, while playing poke the Bear.

They are willing to call Russia’s thermonuclear or thermobaric weapons bluff, while endangering the entire planet and all civilization, just to uphold their old ways. The danger is real even if there are daily phone calls between NATO and Russia, according to Dr. Gilbert Doctorow.

A rebuttal by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow to Dr. Papadopoulus on PressTV about open phonelines since the Cuban Missile crisis:

“That is a view with a sell-by date. And a sell-by date is like 20 years ago. The whole fight that is going on now between NATO driven by the United States, and Russia is over precisely this issue of warning times which would be reduced from the days of 1962 when it may have been a half an hour or 45 minutes and lines of communication may have made sense. Lines of communication between Washington and Moscow have no sense whatsoever if the time between launch and arrival in Moscow or elsewhere in Russia is five to seven minutes. And that is what this war is all about.”

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, “Next Russian Offensive,” PressTV, November 21, 2022

There have been follow-up interviews at PressTV, but since November, no progress between Kiev and Moscow, despite a growing coalition of citizens calling for an end to the war. A peace process proposed by Ukraine with the United Nations as mediator on February 24, 2023 may not make sense for Russia to participate in unless all preconditions are laid aside.