Last week a top Russian general named Igor Kirillov was assassinated outside his Moscow home.
Lt. Gen. Kirillov had served since 2017 as head of Russia’s Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Defense Troops, obviously a position of great importance, and together with an aide, he was killed by an explosive device, with the Ukrainian government immediately taking full credit for his death. Leading British newspapers, closely linked to that country’s intelligence services, quickly declared the assassination completely justified and celebrated the powerful blow that had been dealt to their Russian adversary.
Although there was no acknowledgement of any involvement by the Americans or their NATO allies, it seems very unlikely that such a dangerous, even reckless operation would have been undertaken by the Ukrainians without the foreknowledge and approval of their powerful allies and mentors. Since the war with Russia broke out in February 2022, America alone has contributed some $175 billion to the Ukraine war effort and the Europeans an additional $135 billion. Large portions of these colossal sums have completely funded the entire operating cost of Ukraine’s state and its armed forces, while also contributing the continuing flow of equipment, munitions, and reconnaissance information without which Ukrainian combat operations would almost immediately collapse.
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During wartime, targeting enemy commanders controlling troops in the field or coordinating operations at a frontline headquarters is obviously legitimate, and indeed quite a number of Russian generals have already died during the Ukraine war. But Kirillov held no such combat command and he was killed just outside his home in Moscow, hundreds of miles away from the battlefield, so most independent military analysts characterized the assassination as blatantly illegal, amounting to a terrorist attack or a war crime.
Consider, for example, our early 1990s Gulf War against Iraq. If an assassin hired by Saddam Hussein had struck down Colin Powell, Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, outside his Virginia home, we would have been rightfully outraged at that act of illegal terrorism.
During all the decades of our long Cold War against the Soviet Union, nothing remotely similar to Kirillov’s assassination had ever happened on either side, and it is difficult to imagine that any of our presidents would have permitted such a dangerous, potentially destabilizing act by our own intelligence services or those of our allies. This represents a further sign that all existing standards of international law are increasingly being set aside or ignored, probably with very grave consequences for ourselves and for the entire world.
Over the years, the Israelis have demonstrated a notorious tendency to assassinate their real or perceived enemies all around the world, with those illegal killings numbering in the thousands, while America and its powerful Israel Lobby have successfully insulated that country from any serious penalties or international condemnation. So as a consequence, this once abhorrent and prohibited practice has increasingly become normalized, and the Ukrainians have now apparently decided to take advantage of that unfortunate precedent.
Our proxy-war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border had already involved the sort of enormous risks that no American president of the twentieth century would have contemplated, but even its more conventional side has now taken an especially dangerous turn. During the last few weeks, we have authorized the Ukrainians to fire their American missiles deep into Russian territory and according to numerous experienced military and intelligence experts, the targeting of such weapons has required the use of highly-classified American reconnaissance systems only available to our own personnel. Therefore, such American officers, whether in or out of uniform, must be the ones directing and controlling those missile strikes into Russia, with the Ukrainians merely pushing the button in some literal or figurative sense, and the same is true for similar weapons systems provided by our NATO allies.
Thus, American and NATO missiles directed by American officers using American reconnaissance systems are striking Russian forces in Russian territory while America and the rest of NATO officially remain at peace with Russia. Such a situation would have been regarded as utterly insane during all the decades of NATO-Soviet confrontation.
The likely reason that Kirillov was marked for death suggests even greater American recklessness. The day before his successful assassination, the Ukrainians had declared that the general had been involved in the alleged use of tear-gas by Russian combat troops, but there seems no solid evidence of this, and even if it were true, that would hardly seem to warrant such a provocative, high-profile assassination in Moscow. Instead, independent Western analysts quickly pointed to an entirely different explanation that seemed far more plausible, and Russian sources took the same position.
Just a couple of weeks after the Russians invaded Ukraine, they claimed to have found a network of dozens of biolabs mostly close to the Russian border, funded by our Pentagon and working with deadly anthrax and plague. Such development of offensive biological weapons was blatantly illegal under the treaties signed by most of the countries in the world, including America.
As I wrote at the time, I was initially somewhat skeptical of these accusations, which sounded so much like the outrageous falsehoods about Saddam’s WMDs that the American government had concocted to justify our Iraq invasion, but my views soon changed:
I’d seen some of the same Russian accusations swirling around the Internet, and hadn’t paid much attention. On the one hand, over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on “biodefense,” the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and we had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat. So allocating a few millions or even tens of millions to labs in Ukraine would hardly be implausible.
But on the other hand, even if we hadn’t, the Russians might certainly say we had, with those charges being almost stereotypical examples of the “black propaganda” used by an invading army to justify its attack to the world. Since I don’t read Ukrainian, the documents the Russians claimed to have found would mean nothing to me, and except for zealous partisans on each side, I doubted whether anyone else would be convinced one way or the other.
However, the situation drastically changed on Tuesday, due to the Congressional testimony of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy. She seemed not only to acknowledge the existence of those Ukrainian biolabs but was also apparently concerned that their dangerous contents might fall into enemy hands, thereby seeming to completely confirm those shocking Russian accusations. I’ve never regarded Neocons as particularly bright, but the game-ending own-goal she scored on an issue of the greatest international importance may have set a new record for total incompetence.
I was hardly the only person to notice the massive implications of Nuland’s apparent disclosure. Glenn Greenwald ranks as one of the world’s highest-profile journalists, and he quickly released a lengthy column yesterday morning laying out the facts, and noting that our official media fact-checkers had spent a couple of weeks denouncing and ridiculing accusations that now seem to have turned out to be true.
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- Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them
The neocon’s confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers
Glenn Greenwald • Substack • March 9, 2022 • 2,100 Words
- Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them
Tucker Carlson devoted his top-rated show on cable to the same issue, emphasizing the shame of having to quote official Russian and Chinese government propagandists on the matter because our own American government officials had been lying.
All the facts are not yet in, but at this stage I think we should probably assume that the captured documents provided by the Russians are correct, and our Defense budget was funding the development of deadly biological weapons at Ukrainian labs near the Russian border, including anthrax and plague.
Given that Ukraine ranks as one of Europe’s most corrupt states, word of these projects surely leaked out, and it’s easy to understand why the Russians took a very dim view of it, certainly contributing to their decision to invade. How would America react if a rabidly-hostile Mexican government backed by China were developing deadly bioweapons near the American border?
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Naturally, this gigantic story based upon Nuland’s inadvertent disclosure has been totally ignored by America’s mainstream media, but Carlson’s Youtube clip from last night is already approaching a million views, and the facts will continue to spread.
In support of this same possibility, Russian President Vladimir Putin had expressed serious biowarfare concerns in 2017 about our collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, certainly a highly suspicious project for our government to have undertaken. This raised very dark suspicions that the Neocons running our own government had been following the earlier efforts of their Israeli counterparts in attempting to develop genetically-targeted bioweapons aimed at their potential adversaries.
- Ukraine and Biowarfare Conspiracy Theories
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 10, 2022 • 1,100 Words
Kirillov was the Russian general in charge of defense against biological warfare, so he would have certainly been at the center of that controversy, hardly endearing him to the American officials and intelligence organizations apparently involved in such illegal biowarfare activities. But I don’t recall ever seeing his name mentioned at the time, and I think his connection to that controversy was only discussed following his sudden assassination.
However, a few months after that media storm had erupted over the biolabs, he had taken a very high-profile public role in another, even greater controversy, which is how his name first came to my attention. Yet strangely enough, his leading role in that other matter seems to have been almost entirely tossed down the memory-hole, so much so that I saw very little mention of it by any of the Western analysts discussing the general’s death.
