Month: February 2022

Ukrainian defense forces waged an intense battle on Saturday to keep the capital, Kyiv, and other cities across the country, out of Russian hands. 

Outmanned and outgunned, Ukraine has removed age restrictions to join the military, according to the country’s Minister of Defense Alexey Reznikov. 

“I decided, in agreement with the Commander of the territorial defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Brigadier General Yuri Galushkin, to involve in the territorial defense the Patriots over 60 years old,” Reznikov wrote in a Facebook post on Friday, saying it applied to citizens who are “morally and physically ready to resist and defeat the enemy.”

As intense urban warfare, explosions, rocket attacks, and aerial warfare could be seen across the country, Brigadier General Yuri Galushkin wrote on Facebook that Ukraine needs everybody to fight, and the procedures to enlist have been “simplified.” 

“Bring only a passport and an identification code. There is no age limit” to enlist, Galushkin said. 

Before, Ukraine said citizens between 18 and 60 were eligible to enlist, but now that appears to have widened as Russia established attack lines into three cities, including Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the northeast, and Kherson in the south. Ukrainian troops have been holding their ground in all three areas. 

So far, Russian troops have pushed into Ukraine along the country’s southern, eastern and northern borders. NYTimes provides a snapshot of the Russian incursion’s gained ground. 

The Kyiv Independent reports Saturday that Russia is expected to launch an offensive on all fronts following Ukraine’s refusal to engage in peace talks on Friday. 

Authored by Dr. Jim Green via Common Dreams,

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia poses several nuclear threats, including the possibility of deliberate or inadvertent military strikes or cyber-strikes on nuclear facilities.

There is also the obvious difficulty of safely operating nuclear reactors in a time of war, including the impossibility of carrying out safeguards inspections. Last but not least, there remains the possibility that the conflict will escalate into nuclear warfare. We are about to learn what happens when nuclear-powered nations go to war, putting nuclear power plants at risk of deliberate or accidental military strikes and thus risking a Chernobyl scale catastrophe.

Retaliation

It seems highly unlikely that either nation—or any sub-national groups—would deliberately target nuclear reactors or spent fuel stores in the current conflict. But assuming there is a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ not to target nuclear power plants, how long would that agreement hold in a war that dragged on for years?

Either nation might choose to shut down its reactors in order to minimize risks. That would be a manageable and wise decision for a country with limited reliance on nuclear power—but it would be impractical for countries with a heavy reliance.

In any case, the radioactive reactor cores—whether kept in situ or removed from the reactors—would remain vulnerable, as would nuclear waste stores. Spent fuel cooling ponds and dry stores often contain more radioactivity than the reactors themselves, but without the multiple engineered layers of containment that reactors typically have. And if there is an attack on a reactor or spent fuel store resulting in a Chernobyl or Fukushima scale catastrophe—whether deliberate or accidental, whether instigated by a nation-state or extra-state group—disaster response measures would likely be chaotic and woefully inadequate.

A strike on one warring nation’s nuclear reactors or waste stores could result in like-for-like retaliation. Rinse and repeat until multiple Chernobyl or Fukushima scale catastrophes are unfolding simultaneously.

Conflict

Even if catastrophe was averted, the wisdom of operating nuclear power reactors would be reconsidered in the aftermath of war. The warring nations—and many others besides—would likely reduce their reliance on nuclear power or abandon it altogether. Nuclear power plants are pre-deployed radiological weapons. Put bluntly, humanity might have the wisdom to phase out the use of pre-deployed radiological weapons for electricity generation before nuclear-powered nations go to war and deliberately or inadvertently cause nuclear catastrophes.

Or we might have to learn the hard way that using pre-deployed radiological weapons to boil water wasn’t such a great idea after all. All the more so given the manifold connections between the ‘peaceful atom’ and nuclear weapons programs.

The Russian MOD has published footage from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It says that the local Ukrainian National Guard unit has joined the Russian forces & they’re now guarding the plant together. pic.twitter.com/ZtbVsxGA7t

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) February 26, 2022

The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine provides a test-case of the above war-gaming. The worst-case scenario of nuclear-powered nations at war would involve evenly matched adversaries fighting a long war. The current conflict isn’t so much a war as an invasion of a weaker nation-state by a powerful adversary. Most likely it will not drag on for years as some wars do. That said, simmering conflict stretching on for years is likely, so nuclear plants will remain at risk.

Disaster

Russia has several thousand nuclear weapons. Ukraine ceded ownership and control of nuclear weapons located in Ukraine to Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War—although that hasn’t stopped Putin invoking the spectre of a non-existent Ukrainian nuclear weapons program in recent days.

Russia’s 38 reactors supply 20.6 percent of the country’s electricity. Ukraine’s 15 power reactors across at four sites generate 51.2 percent of the country’s electricity. The risk of an inadvertent attack on reactors or nuclear waste stores is somewhat higher than a deliberate attack. Russia has just taken control of the Chernobyl nuclear site. The reactors were all closed long ago, but high-level nuclear waste remains on site.

James Acton from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that Ukraine has constructed a nuclear waste storage facility at Chernobyl for spent fuel from other nuclear plants, but the introduction of spent fuel has probably not yet occurred. Nevertheless, spent fuel from the Chernobyl reactors is still located there.

It’s conceivable that waste stored at Chernobyl could be hit if and when Ukraine attempts to take back control of the site. The next Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster could happen in Chernobyl. The containment dome over the infamous Chernobyl #4 reactor protects a huge inventory of radioactive material. The next Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster could involve the same reactor.

Dystopian

Incursions and fighting around the Chernobyl plant could also disperse existing contamination. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer recently noted in the Washington Post: “The delivery of air-to-surface munitions, artillery, mortar and multiple rocket-launcher fire in the Belarus-Ukraine border area could also disperse radioactive debris in the soil.”

Craig Hooper, a senior contributor at Forbes writes: “The world has little experience with reactors in a war zone. Since humanity first harnessed the atom, the world has only experienced two ‘major’ accidents—Chernobyl and Japan’s Fukushima disaster.” A Russian invasion, coupled with an extended conventional war throughout Ukraine, could generate multiple International Atomic Energy Agency ‘Level 7’ accidents in a matter of days. Such a contingency would induce a massive refugee exodus and could render much of Ukraine uninhabitable for decades.

“Turning the Ukraine into a dystopian landscape, pockmarked by radioactive exclusion zones, would be an extreme method to obtain the defensive zone Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to want. Managing a massive Western-focused migratory crisis and environmental cleanup would absorb Europe for years.”

Here’s a (slightly) uplifting photo from RIA Novosti.

Shows a Russian soldier and Ukrainian guardsmen keeping a joint eye on the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. pic.twitter.com/r7BJK9U1TW

— The Intel Crab (@IntelCrab) February 26, 2022

He adds: “Put bluntly, the integrity of Ukrainian nuclear reactors is a strategic matter, critical for both NATO and non-NATO countries alike.”

Toxic

“It seems unlikely that Russia has mobilized trained reactor operators and prepared reactor crisis-management teams to take over any ‘liberated’ power plants. The heroic measures that kept the Chernobyl nuclear accident and Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster from becoming far more damaging events just will not happen in a war zone.”

Bennett Ramberg, a former foreign affairs officer in the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, and author of the 1985 book Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy, discussed the nuclear risks associated with the Russia‒Ukraine conflict in a February 14 piece for Project Syndicate.

Ramberg writes: “Power plants are common targets in modern conflict, because destroying them inhibits a country’s ability to carry on fighting. But nuclear reactors are not like other energy sources. They contain enormous amounts of radioactive material, which can be released in any number of ways.”

“Aerial bombing or artillery fire, for example, could break a reactor’s containment building or sever vital coolant lines that keep its core stable. So, too, could a cyberattack that interrupts plant operations, as would a disruption of offsite power that nuclear plants rely on to keep functioning.

“Were a reactor core to melt, explosive gases or belching radioactive debris would exit the containment structure. Once in the atmosphere, the effluents would settle over thousands of miles, dumping light to very toxic radioactive elements on urban and rural landscapes.”

Read the rest of the report at CommonDreams.org

Authored by Peter Schweizer via The Gatestone Institute,

• [Elite capture] is a crucial tool of [China’s] success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

• [Each] of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policy making. Each will say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue the companies they run are truly international…

• Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title Principles, of his “personal hero,” Wang Qishan. “Every time I speak with Wang,” Dalio swooned, “I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe.” Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and known as Xi’s enforcer. The Economist called him “the most feared man in China.” But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.

• Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

• Almost everything [Apple] sells is manufactured in China, and the iPhone has more than 23 percent of the market for phones in China. Apple has repeatedly been accused of benefiting from the forced labor of Chinese Uyghurs, which the company denies.

• As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the “world’s No.1 power,” I came across the phrase “elite capture” — their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.

“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

The Chinese are not subtle about this, and they barely try to hide it. They practice it around the world, most notably in Africa in pursuit of their Belt and Road Initiative. But elites in Western democracies have proved to be a soft touch, particularly among non-governmental elites.

“Red Handed: How American Elites are Helping China Win,” my latest book, centers on this truth and explores how elites in academia, high-finance, sports and entertainment, and the technology sector became apologists for China’s deplorable human rights record, industrial and military espionage, and increasingly aggressive behavior.

What separates this from ordinary diplomacy or even the time-honored business slogan that “the customer is always right” is the power wielded by those who succumb to the temptation. The book investigates the public activities and statements of some of the most powerful people in the US. From the world of Silicon Valley, we explore Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, and Bill Gates of Microsoft. From the world of Wall Street, we looked at Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, the largest hedge-fund investment company in the world, and Larry Fink of BlackRock. From academia we explored the actions of Harvard and Yale universities. We surveyed the relationship histories of the Bush family, the Trudeau family of Canada, the Pelosi family, and of course, the Biden family.

Yet, the news each day is full of still other examples. The way China has co-opted all these people and institutions – and others besides – is alarmingly similar, straightforward, and not hard to piece together. In 30 years of investigative reporting, I am used to having to dig through endless layers of shell corporations, intermediaries, bank records and tax filings to reveal these connections. Yet, the connections between the people and institutions we reviewed, and the Chinese government, fairly glowed on the page once we determined to look at the mechanics of corruption through the lens of Chinese capture of American elites. This is one reason I have said this is the scariest investigation I have ever done.

Pressed to the wall, each of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policy making. Each will say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue the companies they run are truly international corporations and, as such, obligated to take as neutral a stance on American foreign policy as possible.

And they are not fully wrong about that.

Not all of them are as brazen about it as the Sri Lanka-born Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire venture capitalist and investor who in an interview last week waved away the issue of China’s genocide against its own Uyghur citizens with the dismissive “nobody cares.”

Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. At a 2015 state dinner at the White House for visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping, the third-richest man in the world squired his ethnically Chinese, seven-months-pregnant wife over to be introduced to Xi and immediately made a strange request. Would Xi give their unborn child his Chinese name? The communist dictator was shocked by the request and politely declined, explaining it would be “too great a responsibility” to give to a total stranger.

Nor are they as star-struck about it as Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title Principles, of his “personal hero,” Wang Qishan. “Every time I speak with Wang,” Dalio swooned, “I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe.” Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and known as Xi’s enforcer. The Economist called him “the most feared man in China.” But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.

Apple Computers is another great example. Almost everything the company sells is manufactured in China, and the iPhone has more than 23 percent of the market for phones in China. Apple has repeatedly been accused of benefiting from the forced labor of Chinese Uyghurs, which the company denies. But, as a tech investor told Vanity Fair recently, “If you’re Apple and you’ve spent 20 years building infrastructure in China, you can’t just press a button and move your entire infrastructure to India,” adding, “Rebuilding your supply chain takes 10 to 15 years. Right now, I just don’t think they have a choice.”

Of course, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was present at an exclusive meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, where tech titans met Xi even before that 2015 state dinner. When Xi entered the room, a thunderstruck Cook turned to a colleague and said, “Did you feel the room shake?”

For others it happens similarly with commercial opportunities. No one should have been shocked by basketball player LeBron James’s upbraiding another NBA team’s general manager for tweeting about China’s repression of democratic protests in Hong Kong. James earns millions royalties on jerseys and other items bearing his name and likeness in China, but is apparently also expert on foreign affairs, scolding the Houston Rockets’ then-GM Daryl Morey as “either misinformed or not really educated on the situation” regarding Chinese repression of dissent in the territory.

Yet the Chinese communists are not absolutists about this. There is a common phrase in Mandarin that roughly translates: “A lot of help, with a little badmouth.” The phrase captures that the practical Chinese know their friends will have to criticize China’s actions from time to time. But so long as those friends are advancing China’s interests on the important things, they will deign to overlook that.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a harsh critic of China’s human rights abuses. In her first term in Congress, she found herself in Tiananmen Square in 1991 and bravely unfurled a banner inscribed, “To those who died for Democracy in China.” Furious Chinese police seized the banner. “I started running,” Pelosi recalled. “And my colleagues, some of them, got a little roughed up. The press got treated worse because they had cameras, and they were detained.”

She too has recently evolved. And her husband, Paul, has since made millions of dollars in deals with China as a partner investor in Matthews International Capital Management, a pioneer in the Chinese investment market, and through his other ventures. She has, for two years now, blocked efforts by Congress to investigate the origins of the COVID virus. With much of the evidence pointing to the possibility of a lab leak of the virus in Wuhan, Pelosi ordered the Democrats in Congress not to cooperate with any efforts to investigate the matter.

The behavior, statements and actions of these and many other people we discuss at length in the book, certainly suggest the intertwining of their interests with China’s interests. And those interests are thick enough to block out the humanitarian and national security concerns that China’s rise is built upon.

As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The eyes of the world are now fixed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The motivations of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, are now the biggest unanswered question of this geopolitical event. One prominent line of thinking is that Putin is looking to reclaim the territory lost after the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and the Russian leader’s own words appear to support this claim:

Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.

The disintegration of our united country was brought about by the historic, strategic mistakes on the part of Bolshevik and Soviet leaders […] the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR is on their conscience.

For anyone born after the 1970s, memories of that era range from hazy to non-existent, so it’s worth answering the question: What was the USSR anyway?

Below, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley uses historical maps from three specific eras to build context for how the USSR was structured, which modern countries were a part of this sprawling country, and how its history relates to Russia’s present day pushes for territorial expansion.

Let’s dive in.

The Early Days of the Soviet Union

The USSR was first born in 1922, in the aftermath of the fallen Russian Empire. A civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and anti-Bolshevik forces across the region ended with the former coming out victorious. This resulted in the unification of a number of republics to form the Soviet Union.

After a number of tumultuous years during the reign of Joseph Stalin, which include a devastating famine which killed millions of people, we arrive at our first snapshot in time: the late 1930s.

For more detail, view the full-sized version of this map

The USSR was set up as a federation of constituent union republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine, or federations, such as Russia.

Below, we can see how this organizational structure was laid out.

For more detail, view the full-sized version of this diagram

While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by the Russian Republic (RSFSR). This massive republic contained most of the country’s economic and political power, as well as the largest population and landmass. As shown below, its borders weren’t vastly different from the modern day Russian Federation.

For more detail, view the full-sized version of this map

The geopolitical history of the USSR is inexorably bound with territorial disputes with neighboring regions. In the map above, from 1938, we can see that Soviet troops are clashing with Japan on the eastern edge of the country. On the other end, Stalin had annexed half of Poland, the three Baltic States, and portions of Romania, following the pact with Adolf Hitler.

This sequence of events set the stage for World War II.

The Soviet Empire

The USSR achieved victory in WWII, but at a great cost. An estimated 14% of the prewar population perished in the conflict.

By the end of the 1950s though, the Soviet Union was riding high on a string of impressive achievements on the world stage, from launching the first satellite into space to developing missiles that were a credible threat to American cities. As well, the country’s GDP growth was outpacing its Cold War rival.

This map is a snapshot of the USSR just prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1962.

For more detail, view the full-sized version of this map

Above, in orange, we see how much territory the USSR ended up with after the war. This map is especially informative as it lists the populations of the territories at the time. Large portions of Eastern Europe—including more than 22 million people—were rolled behind the iron curtain.

The Waning Days of the USSR

After a prolonged period of stagnation, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet political and economic system with perestroika, which literally translates to “reconstruction”. This movement began a slow process of democratization that eventually destabilized Communist control through the late 1980s, hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The map below is a snapshot of the USSR two years prior to its official dissolution in 1991.

For more detail, view the full-sized version of this map

Many of the republics, shown in various colors above, were already seeing independence movements and unrest by this time, and would eventually declare independence one by one.

Here’s a list of the major regions that seceded from the USSR:

 

Since these regions seceded with their borders largely intact, a current map of this part of the world doesn’t look too different from the one above.

That said, even as borders remain static, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that power dynamics in this region are still very much in flux.

Authored by Katabella Robert via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The New Zealand High Court has upheld a challenge to a vaccine mandate for Police and Defence Force staff, stating that it was not a “demonstrably justified” breach of the Bill of Rights.

Justice Francis Cooke was asked by a group of Police and Defence Force personnel to judicially review the vaccine mandate enacted under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act in December.

The mandate required all Defence Force personnel and all Police constables, recruits, and authorized officers to receive two doses of the vaccine by March 1.

But on Jan. 6, three unvaccinated staff who did not wish to receive the shots sought a judicial review of the mandate. They were supported by affidavits from 37 of their colleagues in the same position.

The group claims that two rights of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 had been limited by the mandate: the right to refuse a medical treatment and the right to manifest religious beliefs.

Part of the group’s religious objections to the mandate were concerns over the fact that “the Pfizer vaccine had at some point been tested on cells that had been derived from a human foetus.”

According to UCLA Health, COVID-19 vaccines do not contain aborted fetal cells but Johnson & Johnson did use fetal cell lines when developing and producing their vaccine, and Pfizer and Moderna used them to test their vaccines to ensure they work.

The group claimed that “requiring vaccination by such a vaccine was in conflict with the religious beliefs of some of the affected persons.”

Cooke, in a judgment (pdf) released on Friday in New Zealand, did not accept some of the applicants’ arguments but agreed that the mandate “is not a reasonable limit on rights that can be demonstrably justified” and set the order aside.

“I conclude that the Order does not involve a reasonable limit on the applicants’ rights that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society and that it is unlawful,” Cooke said.

“The order limits the right to be free to refuse medical treatment recognised by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (including because of its limitation on people’s right to remain employed), and it limits the right to manifest religious beliefs for those who decline to be vaccinated because the vaccine has been tested on cells derived from a human foetus which is contrary to their religious beliefs,” Cooke said.

However, he pointed out the court’s decision did not affect any other vaccine mandates or any internal vaccination policies of the police or Defence Force.

“In essence, the order mandating vaccinations for police and NZDF staff was imposed to ensure the continuity of the public services, and to promote public confidence in those services, rather than to stop the spread of COVID-19. Indeed health advice provided to the government was that further mandates were not required to restrict the spread of COVID-19. I am not satisfied that continuity of these services is materially advanced by the order,” he said.

Cooke also concluded that the mandate affected only a small number of personnel: just 164 unvaccinated personnel in a police workforce of nearly 15,700. For the New Zealand Defence workforce, the mandate affected 115 of its 15,480 staff.

“Moreover there is no evidence that this number is any different from the number that would have remained unvaccinated and employed had the matter simply been dealt with by the pre-existing internal vaccine policies applied by police and NZDF. Neither is there any hard evidence that this number of personnel materially effects the continuity of NZDF and police services,” the judge wrote.

The judge also said it was apparent, based on evidence, that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was highly transmissible and could affect a large number of New Zealanders including police or Defence temporarily but that the termination of jobs arising from the mandate was permanent.

“Vaccination has a significant beneficial effect in limiting serious illness, hospitalization, and death, including with the Omicron variant. But it was less effective in reducing infection and transmission of Omicron than had been the case with other variants of COVID-19,” the judge wrote.

However, Cooke stressed that his decision to set aside the order was not for “the purposes of limiting the spread of COVID-19” but for “the continuity of service of police and Defence.”

“But the order made in the present case is nevertheless unlawful and is set aside,” he wrote.

The applicants were awarded costs.

Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist at the University of Auckland told Stuff NZ that she was disappointed with the decision and that it legally and morally undermines the mandates.

“It’s really disappointing. These are temporary mandates. They are for the benefit of our whole community. Communities have always depended on our people cooperating and working together – right through time since we camped outside the caves. It’s an essential component of a successful society,” Petousis-Harris said.

“This isn’t working together. Right in the middle of a pandemic, it’s not in the spirit of trying to keep us all safe.”

Spokespersons for both Police and NZDF told The New Zealand Herald that terminations of staff who do not get vaccinated will be suspended while the decision is considered by the government.

The Epoch Times has contacted New Zealand Police and NZDF for comment.