The Optimistic Conservative: TOC Ready Room 28 March 2022: Russia-Ukraine and the breakup of NATO; Biolabs and viruses
Two main points for this post regarding Russia and Ukraine. One is that, as most readers will be aware, Russia has declared a new phase of operations, which according to the Russian video brief is to concentrate on consolidating Russia’s territorial gains in Donbas.
This is being presented by Western media as evidence that the invasion so far has been an unmitigated disaster for Moscow. That’s obviously not true. An unmitigated disaster would be one in which Russia, after suffering some apparently significant personnel and equipment losses (I remain wary of going with either side’s numbers on that), had no territorial gains to consolidate.
But Russia does have territorial gains to consolidate. If Ukraine’s government in Kyiv wants to retake the territory, it will have to go on the offensive to do so.
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The second point is that we are seeing commonality of will and expectations in NATO breaking down as we speak. Regular readers know this was the main outcome I predicted before the invasion. It’s happening, and I don’t see a prospect of turn-around. Once decisions are made to re-up national-level security measures in the Allied nations of Europe, those decisions won’t be lightly reversed.
The prism through which this is especially visible at the moment (aside from NATO being unable so far to just deliver some MiG-29s to Ukraine, out of fear of Russia) is missile defense. Missile defense is of special significance because it’s been the main thing the alliance could agree and adopt a common purpose on over the last 20 years.
It’s unraveling now. In the spirit of “Ready Room,” I’m just going to copy in comments I made earlier in an email, regarding Germany’s decision to look at the Israeli Arrow 3 for national missile defense. That’s a very big shift in NATO policy dynamics (again, see my link above for more discussion of that in predictive articles from February and January), and the UK is taking a fresh look at bolstering independent national missile defense as well.
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The connection of Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca investment firm to Metabiota, which was involved with the biolabs in Ukraine and for which Biden raised millions in capital, poses an important question.
Hunter Biden has no more qualifications, background, or expertise in the commercial side of bioscience than he has in the natural gas industry. Moreover, throughout the period when he was running this operation, he was a cocaine addict whose private life seems to have gotten steadily less stable and gratifying. I can’t spend much time looking at the images people keep posting from his laptop on social media, because it’s too sad and kind of icky – but one thing I know, and imagine others do too: no one is happy living that way. This was not someone in charge of his life, working on his own dreams and priorities.
So the question is whose idea it was for Hunter’s investment firm to raise funds for Metabiota, and why. In terms of motive and plan, Hunter is not the droid you’re looking for. Someone else was supplying those.
To really answer that, we’d have to be sure exactly what Metabiota was doing. “Creating bio-weapons” is a simplistic and overhyped claim, without actual proof that bio-weapons were being worked on. We don’t have that. Officially, Metabiota was concentrating on epidemiological research.
Read the rest here.
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