Criticizing His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia for not publicly denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a popular thing to do. Parish priests, bishops, laity, academics, Orthodox organizations, and more have all condemned the Patriarch and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Tweet below from the Orthodox Times is a good example of condemnatory language:
Metropolitan Ioseb differs from others only in that he is exceptionally blunt in his pronouncement. Any Patriarch or Bishop supporting Russia is a heretic. No nuance there. The Fordham-based Website Public Orthodoxy even made condemnation effortless by publishing a declaration you can sign. Feel free to read it and sign it, if you are so inclined.
But before you join in condemning the Russian Orthodox Church, please do us a favor. Take a moment to ponder the following points. You might decide the virtue signaling isn’t worth it. You might even decide to actually work for peace instead.
1. Western Propaganda is blinding you.
It is a trite, though usually accurate, expression that in war truth is the first casualty. In this war, however, there was never any truth to begin with. Westerners recognize Russian propaganda for what it is, and we assume the Russian people are being lied to about the war by the official media. What Westerners (including Americans) fail to see is how our view of this conflict is molded by intense propaganda as well:
Truly, one of the most under-appreciated and overwhelmingly powerful forces on this earth is the US imperial propaganda machine. The ability to manipulate public thought, not just within the United States but across vast swaths of nations, has allowed it to manufacture international consensus for whatever agendas it wishes to advance in a way that eclipses the collective organizing power of official international bodies like the United Nations.
You know what’s funny about this mad push to censor speech in the name of fighting “Russian propaganda” is that the people who are pushing it are indirectly admitting to a very important truth that they normally try not to draw too much attention to: the fact that it’s very possible to use media to manipulate the way people think, act, and vote at mass scale. The part that they don’t admit is that they themselves are far and away the very worst offenders in that area.
The status quo worldview requires two entirely contradictory positions to be held simultaneously: that Russian propaganda has a corrupting influence on public thought, but that orders of magnitude more wealthy and powerful oligarchic media institutions do not.
You are being consciously, deliberately lied to. You don’t really know what is happening in Russia, Ukraine, or possibly anywhere else. You are not making decisions based on facts. You are making decisions based on a narrative. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone is deceived. Even clergy we normally respect are failing to use their God-given discernment to see past the fog of disinformation.
The “War in Ukraine” is being stage-managed by PR companies for the benefit of an audience in the West. This is not hard to recognize. After all, what kind of embattled, imperiled nation relies this much on media? The kind with a former actor for president that wants more aid and more NATO involvement.
Welcome to war in the age of Social Media, where the PR firms managing perceptions of the fighting are just as important as the soldiers in the field.
Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on Feb. 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.
The campaign includes language guides, key messages and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.
Behind Ukraine’s public relations effort is an army of foreign political strategists, Washington, D.C., lobbyists, and a network of intelligence-linked media outlets.
Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told The Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”
Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare.
The war propaganda from Ukraine is designed for Western sensibilities by Western PR firms. It is a sophisticated, multi-pronged operation that has little to do with reality or the Ukrainian people. The effort is heavy on images of LGBT soldiers, women posing with AK-47s ready to go all “Black Widow” on Russian soldiers, tales of heroic resistance against overwhelming odds, and, of course, Russia atrocities.
Most of the “Russian atrocities” we hear about are actually fake. Ukrainian irregulars (usually Nazis) commit atrocities and then rely on a biased Western media to pass them off as “Russian war crimes”:
…while the Western media shows images of the video game War Thunder (here), frames from the movie Star Wars (here), explosions in China (here), videos of military parades (here), footage from Afghanistan (here), from the Rome metro (here) or images of mobile crematoria (here), passing them off as real and recent scenes of Russian “war crimes,” the reality of the war in Ukraine is ignored because it has already been decided to employ the conflict as a weapon of mass distraction that legitimizes new restrictions of freedoms in Western nations, according to the plans of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.
Remember the COVID hysteria? How many Orthodox Christian leaders (bishops and priests) fell for the COVID “narrative”? Many of them, if not most. The same thing is happening again. The same people who sold that narrative are selling this one about a plucky little democracy fighting an unprovoked attack by blood-thirsty savages. That narrative is just as grounded in lies as the COVID one was.
On the basis of those lies, many are willing to fracture the unity of the Orthodox world by “cutting off” the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia is pumping out its own propaganda as well, largely for domestic consumption. Perhaps the Russian clergy are victims of those lies just as much as we in the West are victims of our own. Perhaps neither side has a clear picture of what is really going on. Satan, the father of lies, could be using the propaganda from both sides to harm the Orthodox Church.
Which is all the more reason for everyone to condemn less and pray more.
2. Was this war really an unprovoked act of aggression?
The groundwork for this war was laid years ago, and not by Russia. In April 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of the alliance. That ill-conceived announcement provoked absolute panic in Moscow that never subsided. Justified panic, by the way.
NATO likes to talk about how peaceful and “defensive” the alliance is. Try convincing the Serbs and the Libyans, among others, of that. Given the power of NATO and its track record of aggression, Russia views NATO forces on its border as an existential threat. If Russian or Chinese troops were based in Mexico, we wouldn’t react any differently.
Things really came to a head after Western intelligence agencies and NGOs staged a coup against the Ukrainian government in 2014. We published an eyewitness account of that atrocity here. If you talk to Russians, the war we see on our TVs and social media feeds actually began then. Since the coup:
- The Ukrainian government has attempted to suppress the Russian language, even though it is the primary language in the Eastern half of the country.
- The seceded republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have suffered approximately 14,000 civilian casualties at the hands of organized and irregular Ukrainian troops. Western media ignore those deaths. So do Orthodox critics of the Russian Church.
- Ukraine has received billions in military aid and has hosted NATO military trainers on its soil. While not officially joining NATO, Ukraine has been treated as a de facto member. The US military helped run a long-standing, publicly acknowledged training program for Ukrainian troops in the country’s western region. That program included instruction in how to use Javelin anti-tank missiles and sniper training. Yahoo News reported about the CIA’s secret U.S.-based training initiative for Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. That program, which began in 2015, also included instruction in firearms, camouflage techniques and covert communications. Yahoo News’ prior report also revealed that CIA paramilitaries had traveled to eastern Ukraine to assist forces loyal to Kiev in their fight against Donetsk and Lugansk.
- Leaked documents and Congressional testimony confirm that the Pentagon funded and had access to biolaboratories in Ukraine. According to internal documents, Pentagon contractors were given full access to all Ukrainian biolaboratories which handled dangerous pathogens, while independent experts were denied even a visit. The new revelations challenge the U.S. government statement that the Pentagon just funded biolaboratories in Ukraine but had nothing to do with them.
- On February 19, 2022, at a conference in Munich, Zelensky announced his intention to end the Budapest Memorandum (1994), which prohibits Ukraine from developing, proliferating and using atomic weapons. Ukraine has nuclear capability, so this was not an empty threat. Can you imagine if the president of Mexico announced his desired to produce nuclear weapons as a deterrent to US aggression? The most likely American reaction would turn Mexico City into a smoking crater.
- Russia alleges that Ukrainian forces were massing for an assault to take back the entire Donbas and subject the Russians there to rule by a government they explicitly reject.
The West doesn’t actually care about Ukraine. If we did, then we would be actively pursuing a cease fire to save lives followed by sincere negotiations to end this war forever. Especially since Russian demands for peace are reasonable for a Great Power:
- Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory. Crimea was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783.
- Recognize the independence of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine. These Russian-speaking populations were part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years, and do not want to be ruled by an anti-Russian government in Kiev.
- Amend the constitution of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance.
- Demilitarization. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe. It should be spending money on development, not arms.
Those are the basics for an agreement. Which of those points is an existential threat to the existence of Ukraine?
The West is not trying to broker an end to this war. Instead, the West is trying to prolong the conflict as much as possible. This increases profits for arms manufacturers. It puts pressure on Russia that our intelligence agencies hope will bring about the fall of Putin. For progressive Orthodox, particularly those related to the Patriarch of Constantinople, it provides an opportunity to wrest control of global Orthodoxy from the world’s largest Orthodox Church. After that, they can really get busy on their goal of turning Orthodoxy into the next Episcopal Church.
Above all, the war provides a crisis to continue the social restructuring begun under COVID. Call it the New World Order, the Great Reset, or whatever you like. Honest observers, even within Ukraine, acknowledge that this war, and the accompanying economic crisis, are simply the next pretext for expanded global governance. Ukrainian parliamentarian Kira Rudik told Fox News, while holding a Kalashnikov: “We know that we are not only fighting for Ukraine, but also for the New World Order.”
Thousands of the world’s most powerful corporate, political, and cultural leaders speak using the same slogans while cooperating closely in the execution of the same agenda as discussed at annual conferences they all attend. But if you notice these facts, you are a deranged conspiracy theorist. For a “conspiracy”, they sure are public about it.
The War in Ukraine is not a Marvel comics movie. It is a complex, multi-faceted conflict in which real people are suffering and dying. We need an immediate cease fire and honest, sincere negotiations to end the conflict and restore peace.
All Orthodox bishops, clerics, and laity should be actively promoting an end this war and not its prolongation or expansion. Condemn less, support negotiations more.
3. Is this really a fight between good and evil?
The fight between Russia and Ukraine is framed as pure good versus pure evil. The Ukrainians are noble defenders of their homeland, while the Russians are evil invaders. Only, the situation is much more complex on the ground. Many of the irregular troops fighting for Ukraine are Nazis. No, really. Actual, honest-to-goodness Nazis.
Western media has created an image of a Ukraine united against Russian aggression. The reality is that Nazis like the Azov battalion and its allies hate a large part of the Ukrainian civilian population. Prior to the invasion, they were not above slaughtering them. During the invasion, they are not above using them as human shields.
Nazis are not good people. Where there are Nazis, there will be atrocities. A fact that seems to have gotten lost in the current war hysteria.
There are actual mass graves in the Donbas full of Ukrainian Nazi victims. There is also public testimony linking the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian oligarchs to those killings. Sergey Litvinov, a captured Ukrainian soldier from the ‘Dnepr’ battalion, admitted to killing civilians including women and children in the villages Melovoye, Shiroky, Makarovo and Kamushnoye. Litvinov said he received money for the killings from his leadership sponsored by Ihor Kolomoysky, the Kiev-appointed Dnepropetrovsk governor and oligarch who was the owner of Burisma, the energy company which appointed Hunter Biden to its board. Kolomysky was also the primary financial backer of Ukrainian President Zelensky. (More on that below.)
The conduct of the Nazis during the current phase of this war has been deplorable – whether fighting as irregulars (such as Azov) or as part of the official Ukrainian Army. Recent interviews with evacuees from the city of Mariupol described how Azov fights with no regard for civilians. One woman gave an account of Azov using them as human shields and of Ukrainian forces placing armored vehicles in the immediate vicinity of bomb shelters. Civilians were sent “like a herd of animals” by Ukrainian security forces into basements for days without provisions. A group of Mariupol refugees evacuating to Russia also said they had been kept by Ukrainian soldiers against their will who used them as “human shields.” Another group said Azov prevented them from evacuating through humanitarian corridors, keeping them in basements, and that they had seen them shoot civilians.
There is a large Greek community close to Mariupol in a place called Sartana. After the Russians took their area, they gave interviews which have been reported in the Greek press:
A correspondent for Russian media asked a civilian of the village that “Western, EU, and Greek media say that the Russians are killing Ukrainians, terrorising the world, etc. Can you, as Sartana’s Greeks, say something to your compatriots in Greece?”
The Greeks of Sartana responded: “Nobody kills anyone here. The Russians do not kill anyone.”
“No one is shooting at civilians here.
“As soon as the Russians came here, they immediately brought us help. Right now, immediately after the shootings stopped.
“Now no one asks us if you are Ukrainian or Greek, about your origin, what language you speak,” they said.
“The Russians do not discriminate,” they continued, adding: “While the Ukrainians did, they forced us to speak only Ukrainian, although I do not know it at all.”
The Mariupol-based Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian Republican Guard, which falls under the command of the Interior Ministry, was based in Mariupol and discriminated, persecuted and tortured non-Ukrainian speakers, including Greeks.
Only days before Russian troops started crossing into Ukraine, the Azov Battalion killed an ethnic Greek and shot another two only for speaking Russian.
There is now ample evidence of civilians being tortured, abused, and humiliated by regular and irregular Ukrainian forces. Indeed, the situation appears to be getting worse. Gennadiy Druzenko, a Ukrainian military field hospital commander, bragged that he “gave strict orders to castrate all the wounded” Russians “because they are cockroaches, not humans.” He later walked those comments back, but it’s not hard to see how this rampant anti-Russian antipathy threatens the Russian minority in Ukraine just as much as it does Russian soldiers.
Of course, Nazis being what they are, Roma, other minorities, and just people they don’t like are also at risk. Images keep showing up of civilians tied to lamp posts in the freezing cold, sometimes with their clothing removed. Westerners are leaping to the defense of such atrocities by claiming the victims are “looters” and “deserve” their treatment.
Have we declined so much that we excuse and fund Nazis now? How can opposition to Putin and the Russians justify any of this in our eyes?
No one is trying to excuse any civilian deaths at the hands of the Russians. However, no matter how many propaganda shorts are filmed, this is reality and not Hollywood. The situation on the ground is way more complicated than an action movie. Simplistic condemnations on the basis of contrived narratives are not appropriate.
4. Is Zelensky really a hero for “democracy”?
The Western Media has branded Ukraine a democracy and President Zelensky a hero for defending his nation against the Russians.
But is that true? Archbishop Carlo Vigano’, former Apostolic Nuncio in the United State for the Catholic Church and an highly informed observer of Eastern European cultural and political matters doesn’t think so (March 6):
It is dismaying to see with what hypocrisy the European Union and the United States – Brussels and Washington – are giving their unconditional support to President Zelensky, whose government for eight years now has continued to violently persecute Russian-speaking Ukrainians with impunity (here), for whom it is even forbidden to speak in their own language… And it is scandalous that they are silent about the use of civilians as human shields by the Ukrainian army, which places anti-aircraft positions inside population centers, hospitals and maternity wards, schools and kindergartens precisely so that their destruction can cause deaths among the population.
Who is Zelensky and how did a comic actor become president of Ukraine? Zelensky campaigned against war and corruption, promising to find peace with Russia while looking out for the common man. The problem is, that was all a lie and Zelensky is actually a product of the corruption he campaigned against.
Zelensky’s campaign was 100% supported by The Servant of the People party (same name as in his TV show) which actually “has fewer donors than deputies in the parliamentary faction (248 people).” The main supporter was oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky – funder of Nazis who was fingered as paying bounties for the murder of civilians in Eastern Ukraine. His television station 1+1 hosted Zelensky’s hit show, in which he played the president of Ukraine. Kolomoisky’s media outlet provided security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign. Zelensky’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Kolomoisky is currently in exile, splitting time between Geneva and Tel Aviv. Investigative journalists reported that Zelensky traveled 14 times in the past two years to those locations to see the oligarch.
Archbishop Carlo Vigano offers this picture of Zelensky as a performer, a politician, and a corrupt tool of global elites:
Zelensky’s performances as a drag queen are perfectly consistent with the LGBTQ ideology that is considered by his European sponsors as an indispensable requirement of the “reform” agenda that every country ought to embrace, along with gender equality, abortion and the green economy. No wonder Zelensky, a member of the WEF [World Economic Forum] (here), was able to benefit from the support of Klaus Schwab and his allies [including George Soros] to come to power and ensure that the Great Reset would also be carried out in Ukraine…. In his homeland, many accuse him of having taken power away from the pro-Russian oligarchs not to give it to the Ukrainian people, but rather to strengthen his own interest group and at the same time remove his political adversaries.
Zelensky’s entire career, persona, even his personal style are all media contrivances. As is his commitment to “democracy”. An authentic “democracy” requires respect for political opposition. Respect which Zelensky clearly does not have. Zelensky recently banned 11 opposition political parties and nationalized all media. Any activities supporting the parties labeled “pro-Russian” are now illegal. The opposition parties largely represent the 17% of the Ukrainian people who are ethnic Russians, and who have been repeatedly targeted by language and cultural laws. The new presidential order is a part of Zelensky’s information policy that combines “all national TV channels…[into] a single information platform of strategic communication.”
Zelensky rules as a dictator while his people suffer in a war they cannot win. He eschews honest negotiation to serve a globalist agenda. Zelensky is trying his best to draw in NATO and expand this war at the risk of nuclear holocaust. He thumbs his nose at the moral and cultural heritage of his own people.
Zelensky is no hero. He is not even a decent person.
5. Hypocrisy is a bad look for a Theologian.
Many of the same Orthodox Theologians, currently demanding the Russian Church condemn the war in Ukraine, conspicuously failed to condemn the US destruction visited upon Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, Syria…
DEVASTATING SCENES AS RUSSIAN BOMBS DESTROY UKRAINE.
— NoRisk_NoReward (@noreward_norisk) March 20, 2022
Not really, it’s US/British bombs falling on Baghdad, Iraq in 2003, after the governments lied about weapons of mass destruction and a over million people died as a result. pic.twitter.com/3y1xnji03d
The US and its allies reserve the right to destroy anyone, anywhere, any time for any reason. When going to war, the US and its allies employ devastating, unrestrained force that has killed millions around the globe. There are no rules or war crimes trials for Western leaders – no matter the cost of their “interventions” in human lives and suffering. By comparison, the Russian effort in Ukraine has been remarkably careful and restrained. In 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles as compared to the United States which flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war. In 78 days, NATO dropped 14,000 bombs on Serbia, plus 10 to 15 tons of depleted Uranium.
Unlike the US in past wars, Russia is not deliberately targeting civilians or bombing indiscriminately. Russia could be killing civilians by the thousands if they wanted to. But they don’t, because at the end of this war, Putin wants very much to live in peace with his closely-related neighbor. We in the West fail to see the real conflict for what it truly is. The “Global South” nations see things much more clearly. This clarity is why so many non-Western nations, and non-Western Orthodox Churches, have declined to support either the Ukrainian war effort or Western sanctions on Russia.
There is more hypocrisy than just excusing any and all use of force by the United States and its allies, or justifying the waging of economic war on a full 25% (currently) of the world’s population. There is also the stunning embrace by Western Elites of concepts they regularly attack everywhere else besides Ukraine.
Borders – Borders are not important. In the FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church from the Greek Archdiocese (blessed by the Ecumenical Patriarch) we find the following:
The modern nation-state is not a sacred institution, even if it can at times serve the causes of justice, equity, and peace. Nor are borders anything more than accidents of history and conventions of law.
At least certain, prominent elements within the Greek Archdiocese are all-in for global governance and the curtailment of the dreaded nation state. Borders are obsolete. Except in Ukraine, of course. There borders are sacred and inviolable. Trading land for peace could work in Israel, maybe, but in Ukraine that is impossible. Not one precious foot of Ukrainian soil can be surrendered. The Ukrainian state is holy as are its borders. Even though, of all the nations on Earth, the borders of Ukraine are the very definition of an “accident of history.”
Do you want the United States to control its Southern border and maintain its national sovereignty? Then you are a racist trying to defend an “accident of history.” Are you a Russian living in the Donbas and you want independence for your home? You too are an evil person. Are you a Russian who loves Russia and wants its borders protected from possible NATO attack? You are no better than Hitler.
But if you are willing to burn down the whole world to keep Ukraine whole – congratulations and welcome to the mainstream.
Nationalism and Ethnic Hatred – Again, the globalist attitude is very well expressed by the Greek Archdiocese via its Social Ethos document.
it is absolutely forbidden for Christians to make an idol of cultural, ethnic, or national identity. There can be no such thing as a “Christian nationalism,” or even any form of nationalism tolerable to Christian conscience. This must, unfortunately, be emphasized at the present moment, on account of the unexpected recrudescence in much of the developed world of the most insidious ideologies of identity, including belligerent forms of nationalism and blasphemous philosophies of race.
The Church rejects all violence—including defensive acts—that are prompted by hate, racism, revenge, selfishness, economic exploitation, nationalism, or personal glory. Such motives, which are all too often the hidden springs behind the waging of so-called “just wars,” are never blessed by God. Moreover, even in those rare situations in which the use of force is not absolutely prohibited, the Orthodox Church still discerns a need for spiritual and emotional healing among all persons involved.
Much digital ink is spilled condemning any form of “American” or “Russian” so-called “Christian nationalism”. Wanting to preserve your national heritage, language, borders, and religious traditions is a sin against diversity, which is the ultimate good thing that all must embrace. It is perfectly okay for you to be religious in your personal life, just don’t try to influence public policy on behalf of those beliefs. That is immoral “Christian nationalism.” Well, immoral unless you are Ukrainian.
Ukrainians have special moral rights to be ultra-nationalist Nazis who attack and slaughter their neighbors. In Ukraine, you can oppress minorities in pursuit of “Ukrainian nationalism”. You can fight a vicious war on the basis of “nationalism” and still be white as snow. In Ukraine, the government-sponsored Church (OCU) can use force to punish other religious bodies, kidnap their leaders, and steal their churches. Ukraine doesn’t need political pluralism and ethnic / religious diversity – Ukraine needs unity in the face of the Russian threat!
Some animals are surely more equal than others in the eyes of God.
The same “moral leaders” who wrote the Social Ethos document are conspicuously silent as anti-Russian ethnic hatred results in deaths in Ukraine and oppression around the globe. The laity will notice the Orthodox leaders who are silent on this ethnic persecution.
6. Your people are getting hammered while you morally posture about a foreign war.
Economic sanctions are deeply immoral. They impact the “least of these” that the Church claims to care about. Putin will never miss a meal. Many poor and working-class people around the world absolutely will. Unlike prior rounds of economic warfare, the impacts will not be limited to those unlucky enough to live in the “Global South”.
Western, advanced countries are also about to suffer extreme economic hardship. The sanctions against Russia have probably broken the world financial system. The effects are about to be felt by every member of every Orthodox parish in the US. Inflation, broken supply chains, shift to digital currencies, hunger, job loss, and more are realistic outcomes of the global disruption. We covered all that in this article.
Even President Biden has acknowledged that food shortages will be real, even in the US. Biden was speaking as rising mortgage rates are making housing ever less affordable to the average American. If you want to see a developing crisis, just look outside your window. You don’t even need a television.
Every Orthodox bishop and priest needs to heed what we are about to say – you can’t continue to morally preen about a war thousands of miles away while your own people suffer in front of you. After COVID, many of you have precious little credibility left. Keep this up, you will have none. The war in Ukraine must end through negotiations. We should all pray hard for peace, and stop supporting war.
Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America
As an Irish Roman Catholic, with a fondness for Eastern Rite Orthodoxy, and a Canadian citizen, I totally support President Putin. I watched his movements and speeches for years and used to wonder “how can this man be so PATIENT considering all the self-serving abuses the West has been hurling upon him?” I pray for him. He is a great man in all ways.
This is a very well written, and accurate article. I served in Kosovo with the US army, and my father is an Orthodox Priest in America. I had a security clearance, and spent 2 years training with US special forces as well. The war in Ukraine was a planned effort by NATO forces (primarily the US and UK), and Putin was forced into a precarious situation after the CIA-backed coup in Kiev and the atrocities committed in Odessa. The Orwellian media machine will never allow you to see what is behind the curtain – but I assure anyone reading, this article is accurate through and through, and anyone who is a supporter of the Slavic people or the Orthodox Church should support Russia in entirety in its efforts, as they do everything they can for the good of both of those entities.
“I had a security clearance, …”
— Who doesn’t? Basically almost anyone in the armed forces, down to the very lowest ranks, can have at one point or another security clearance of one kind or another. The fact that you spent time in the military and that you had security clearance doesn’t mean a thing.
“… but I assure anyone reading, this article is accurate through and through, …”
— How can you “assure” that? Because you happen to have spent time in the military and had some “security clearance”?
“… and anyone who is a supporter of the Slavic people or the Orthodox Church should support Russia in entirety in its efforts,…”
— Some Slavic people beg to differ:https://www.la-croix.com/Monde/Russie-Marina-Ovsiannikova-journaliste-rebelle-assignee-resistance-2022-08-12-1201228694
[…] to refrain from calling out Patriarch Kirill’s complicity in the war. Worse yet, radical all-anonymous Orthodox websites parrot Russian state propaganda about Ukrainian “fascism,” in the face of […]
[…] Кирила до війні. Що ще гірше, радикальні повністю анонімні православні веб-сайти проводять російську державну пропаганду про […]
[…] to refrain from calling out Patriarch Kirill’s complicity in the war. Worse yet, radical all-anonymous Orthodox websites parrot Russian state propaganda about Ukrainian “fascism,” in the face of all fact-checking to […]
“ It is dismaying to see with what hypocrisy the European Union and the United States – Brussels and Washington – are giving their unconditional support to President Zelensky, whose government for eight years now has continued to violently persecute Russian-speaking Ukrainians with impunity (here), for whom it is even forbidden to speak in their own language… ”
Zelensky was elected in 2019.
What a antiSemitic diatribe. Not just the quote.
The quote is from Archbishop Carlo Vigano’, as you should have seen from the article. Are you saying the Archbishop is anti-Semitic? Or we are anti-Semitic? Actually, where in the article were Jews mentioned? We mentioned Nazis, but not Jews. Yes, Zelensky was elected in 2019. new captain, same crew. Despite campaigning for peace and the average guy, Zelensky turned into just another tool of oligarchic rule. He is a non-practicing Jew by heritage it seems. That does not make him immune from criticism. Or entitle him to any additional criticism. The suppression of the language and culture of Russian citizens of Ukraine has proceeded with no interruption since 2014. That is why Vigano made the statement he did. Why is that anti-Semitic?
Re: 6 Reasons to Stop Before You Criticize Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and the Russian Orthodox Church
One can criticize Patriarch Kirill with out criticizing the Russian Orthodox Church. There seems to be plenty of criticism of Patriarch Kirill from within the Russian Orthodox Church. Certainly, there must have been quite a number of Russian Orthodox Christians among those who protested against the war on Russian streets and who were beaten up and arrested by police.
( https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2022/02/photos-anti-war-protests-russia/622914/ ).
Notwithstanding that certain hawkish circles in the US now finally got the war they wanted
( US fighting Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’: veteran US diplomat : https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/24/us-fighting-russia-to-the-last-ukrainian-veteran-us-diplomat/ ),
I hold the view the declaration on “Public Orthodoxy” that you linked to does make valid points; but:
The declaration states:
‘We are called to not merely pray for peace, but to actively and prophetically stand up and condemn injustice …’
And:
‘We therefore condemn as non-Orthodox and reject any promotion of spiritual “quietism” among the faithful and clergy of the Church, from the highest Patriarch down to most humble layperson …’
If the initiators and signatories of that declaration hold those views: That Christians are called to “actively and prophetically stand up and condemn injustice”:
Where were their voices during the rollout of fascism under the pretext of health protection during the last two years?
Have they spoken out against the gross human rights violations during the last two years ?
Have they spoken out against the de-facto large-scale expropriation of independent businesses?
Have they spoken out against defamation and slander of oppositional voices during the last two years?
Have the spoken out against gross police violence against participants of peaceful demonstrations?
Have they spoken out against people being manipulated, pressured or flatly coerced into taking part in a medical experiment, in violation of the the Nuremberg Code?
Patriarch Kirill’s remarks are scandalous and embarrassing.
But so are Patriarch Bartholomew’s:
https://www.goarch.org/-/2021-oct-30-address-of-ecumenical-patriarch-bartholomew-at-athenagoras-human-rights-award-dinner
If the question is Public Orthodoxy, then they were all in favor of everything you mentioned. They are serious Covidians. We covered their FAQ doc Which Vaccine Should I Receive? in this article: https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-hard-sell-on-covid-vaccines/
We covered Patriarch Bartholomew’s sucking up to Pfizer here: https://orthodoxreflections.com/is-the-patriarchate-of-constantinople-an-enemy-of-the-american-people/
We don’t support the war. Neither do we support the unlimited use of American power that these same theologians simply ignore. We don’t support economic warfare that destroys the global economy and reduces everyone to penury but the rich and connected. We don’t support WWIII and the possible escalation to nuclear exchange. And we don’t support giving US tax dollars to Nazis in Ukraine, or propping up the Zelensky regime as it violates religious, political, and free speech rights. Nor do we support anti-Russian or really anti-anyone violence. We simply traded anti-vaxxer for anti-Russian, but the hate rolls on.
You make very good points about Covid. This is the continuation of COVID.
This war must be ended via negotiation that is acceptable to both sides. Otherwise, it will end in a guerilla war funded by NATO, Russia liquidating Ukraine (they will not tolerate a loss) or WWIII and we all die.
After searching the article byline unsuccessfully for the author of this “article”, I found it finally at the very end. It’s Nicholas. Nicholas wrote this article. If this doesn’t tell you all you need to know about the propaganda piece you just read, then you are who it was written for. “Nicholas” is likely a bot culling all the talking points from far right propagandists (including Fox News in America) and Kremlin apologists and dumping them together into an article seemingly well-researched to the illiterate and un-discerning. And the willfully ignorant. Sad, but thankfully confined to the echo chambers of the delusional zealots who think Putin isn’t insane.
Well, if we are confined to an echo chamber, we must not be very important then. Just curious, what evidence do you have that Putin is insane? Putin is actually rather cautious. If Putin falls or is replaced, why would you assume the new regime would not be even more belligerent? What is also fun about your comment is a) why would a typical Orthodox name like Nicholas set you off? Everyone has some version of the name, even the Poles. b) you don’t take issue with anything specific, so you skimmed the article. Crime think makes your head hurt?
The name of Nicholas doesn’t set me off at all. The fact that he doesn’t have a last name does. Should anyone spend any time at all considering this article if the author doesn’t have a full name? The answer is no. This article was written by a bot as evidenced by its lack of smooth transitions from point to point. I recognize I’m arguing in a pro-Putin echo chamber, so I have no intention of trying to convince any of you to abandon your lock-step obedience to your Dear Leader. I simply wanted to stop by to let you know that intelligent humans are disappointed in your inability to recognize that you’re being taken advantage of by a corrupt and criminal regime.
Nicholas would be much more willing to use his last name, if he hadn’t lost out on several executive jobs over the years due to his public opposition to the US war in Iraq and the bombing campaign in Syria. As we’ve said before, lots of contributors write anonymously because cancel culture is a thing and it is not even new. Just ask anyone who publicly opposed any MIC project over the years. Or the poor lady who lost out on the CEO position for Levi’s for advocating for open schools. You posted your comment without a full name, didn’t you? If you don’t take us seriously, then that is your prerogative. We don’t know who you are, and really we don’t care. We are responding to your comments. Either a post can stand alone as a contribution to the public discourse or it can’t. The identity of the author is irrelevant in that regard, unless the author is trying to argue from authority. Which is rare on our site, as we don’t encourage that kind of thinking.
So your contention is that the article was assembled by a bot, like a Twitter post? If you don’t like the style the post was written in, that is your right. But we are unaware of a “bot” that could put together 3,000 words with original analysis joining information gleaned from multiple sources with all the images. Would be a Hell of an AI tool, if it existed. As for transitions, it is a list is it not?
Nicholas also wrote this one: https://orthodoxreflections.com/are-you-ready-for-poverty-starvation-and-digital-control/
Better transitions?
The article is pro-Putin? You don’t have to be pro-Putin to recognize the issues with Ukraine and the Western propaganda propping up the regime. This war must end with a negotiated settlement. NATO is prolonging the war and stopping a good faith settlement. Russia will not accept a loss. They will completely destroy Kiev first. The sanctions are ruining the world economy. Even President Biden acknowledged coming food shortages. Cease fire, negotiations, and accept that Russian security requirements must be met.
Again, we must point out that you did not actually take issue with anything we wrote or reported. You simply dismiss it all as pro-Russian propaganda. For an “intelligent human”, that is not particularly impressive. We publish comments that are critical of our posts. This is far from an echo chamber. Given how you write, however, it is clear that you probably did not actually read the article and you keep yourself firmly in an echo chamber on the regular. If you read the article, there should be at least some things you agree with, if you are a fair person. At the very least, you should be able to agree that having Nazis in the Ukrainian military is a horrible thing, Zelensky’s actions against political rivals is anti-Democratic, the sanctions are harming everyone, and the West has a history of war crimes. If there is nothing in this article you can agree with, then it is you who is being taken advantage of by a corrupt and criminal regime, not us.
I agree with this article. Putin is doing the job he has to do. Ukraine was getting ready to nuke Russia, and/or deploy biological weapons engineered to kill Slavs, particularly Russians. Ethnic cleansing had been under way in Ukraine for eight years, already. Russia moved in at the last moment, really. There was going to be a reckoning.
“THIS IS RUSSIAN PROPOGANDA, THE THINGS IS OPPOSITE. DON’T BELIEVE THIS!! DO YOUR RESEARCH. kirill is blessing russian solders massively kill Ukrainian people especially civilians and supports putin.”
Irene – This is your one freebie. You are welcome to disagree with anything we publish, but it has to be a substantive comment. Labeling a post as Russian propaganda then piling on a few assertions does not qualify. Another such comment will not be approved.
This is truly the age of lies and delusions. Not too long ago the truckers protesting mandates were called nazis with zero justification and now the media is either ignoring or subtly trying to rehabilitate the whole nazi image. Unfortunately, there is a current of sympathy for fascism in the west that goes back to before the second world war – mostly among the elites. Not only in ideology but in practice. The whole idea of eugenics was enthusiastically accepted in some parts of the west and persisted stubbornly after the nazis were defeated (The Eugenics board in Alberta, for example, was only abolished in the early 70s). Mussolinis definition of fascism as the marriage of “corporation and the state” describes many leading western democracies. It is sad to see this demonic ideology rearing its head in full view but not surprising when you look at spiritual state of much of the world today.
I agree with with what you wrote except for the bit about the truckers protesting mandates. No they weren’t Nazis but what they were doing was silly. And they weren’t actually truckers, either.
It was the use of a sledgehammer to crush a fly that set off so much panic. If that level of financial control can be deployed against mere nuisance protestors, then that is truly frightening.
This is actually a pretty good article.
My stance: you don’t have to pick a side.
invasions, bombings, missile launches = good
Multiple spoons = the epitome of heresy
We really do have our priorities in order here.
Did you read this, Jonathan Hill? Missile launches are not good, regardless of who launches the missiles. Are you advocating for multiple spoons now?
If missile launches are not good, then shouldn’t Kirill be condemning them? And wouldn’t it then be okay to criticize Kirill for not condemning them? You claim that you are against the war yet you publish article after article doing everything you can to deflect blame from the architects of the war and their supporters.
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And I did not say one word advocating for multiple spoons, that was a disingenuous deflection there on your part. Personally my church has only done single spoon communion but in terms of judging others I am quite ambivalent – I believe the grace of God works through the beautiful mystery of Holy Communion regardless of the number of spoons. My statement questioned your priorities in judgment – you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
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In back-to-back essays you vehemently condemned Archbishop Sotirios for his simple action of removing a stumbling block from his congregants and ensuring all could participate without worry, then rebuked those who criticized Patriarch Kirill for his shortcomings on a far weightier matter. Perhaps with full faith Paul can eat food consecrated to idols, perhaps with full faith OR can take communion from a single spoon, perhaps with full faith Patriarch Kirill can find it within himself to criticize the man who he has been so closely connected to in power. But if in a particular congregation a bishop feels some in his congregation may be tripped up by a single spoon during a pandemic, and prioritizes the distribution of Holy Communion over the rigid adherence to the rules of man, then why not make allowances on such a minor thing? It seems a far lesser step than making allowances for the sanctioning of largescale killing and death.
I don’t condemn missile launches that save a people from genocide. I applaud them. May this operation be over swiftly, with minimal casualties. May the Ukrop Nazis repent, before it’s too late. I don’t want death. But less death is better than more death, and the special operation is about exactly that.
I’ll note your full-throated celebration of the missile strikes and killing, note that the blog authors will certainly not dispute you at all, in my evaluation of whether they actually condemn the war like they claim and are not just speaking out of both sides of their mouth.
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If you seriously think the missile launches are “saving a people from genocide”, then there isn’t any serious conversation to be had. Those of us who have been following the war for 8 years and didn’t get out talking points from Putin last month know that he sent the Wagner Group into Donbass in 2014 to start this war, headed by an actual neo-Nazi, Dmitry Utkin, with multiple neo-nazis alongside him. Do you seriously believe that Putin sent neo-nazis into Donbas in order to start a war with other neo-Nazis so that he could then launch missile strikes and full-fledged invasion in order to “stop” the war that he started in the first place?
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And further confounding your delusions is the fact that due to Putin’s actions, nationalist sentiment in Ukraine is surely higher than ever. Is there any more surefire way to encourage violent nationalism than to invade as a foreign power? Putin isn’t “denazifying” Ukraine, he’s inflaming it. Everyone knows this. But Putin only expects a useful minority to believe him anyway – just like his claims that he wasn’t going to invade and was just running “training exercises”, just like his claims that his allies in Donbas didn’t shoot down MH-17, just like his claims that he wasn’t in Crimea (until suddenly he admitted that he was), just like all the other lies he tells.
Putin did not start the Donbass war. The effective spark for that war was the Odessa massacre. It showed the Donbass people who they were dealing with. At that point, things got very serious. The UAF started moving into Donbass, and many of the UAF who were already stationed there, rebelled in support of the locals. The locals stormed SBU offices (admittedly there were FSB agents teaching them how this could be done) and armed themselves. After a lot of bloody fighting, (and plenty of atrocities committed by the Maidan government, justified by the blanket labeling of ALL Donbass residents as “terrorists”) the Donbass defense forces were beating the UAF and the Nazi militias (Azov, for instance, was at the frontline) so badly that they were forced to sign the Minsk agreements, although they never fully honored them, preferring to continue targeting both soldiers and civilians. So I’m glad the Russia has finally moved in, to end the suffering of children who have never known any other life than that of being shot at, day and night. In many wars, it’s not clear who is in the right. In this was, there simply cannot be any question. The US-controlled Maidan government has made this operation inevitable.
Claiming that the war in Donbas was “sparked” well after Putin had already sent Wagner Group mercenaries into the region suggests you’ve clearly lost the plot.
The problem you have, Jonathan, is timing.
The Kiev military campaign launched on April 15, 2014 against the Donbass.
May 10 and May 11, 2014, in referenda, the residents of Lugansk, Donetsk, and Mariupol Ukraine voted in favor of independence from the Kiev.
According to the SBU (Ukraine’s security service), Wagner PMCs were initially deployed to eastern Ukraine on 21 May 2014.
The war started on 4/15. Lugansk and Donetsk declared independence on 5/10 and 5/11. Wagner shows up on 5/21 to support already declared independent states.
Which means that the Wagner PMCs, no matter how evil they may be, are not responsible for the civil war. They joined it in progress.
Wagner mercenaries were in Ukraine from February 2014. They first engaged in operations in Crimea and then once that was under control in March they began training pro-russian separatists who were funded and supplied by russia and then began operations throughout the other provinces in eastern Ukraine. The exact moment that the Wagner mercenaries moved from Crimea to the rest of Ukraine is irrelevant when it was obvious that they clearly sparked, guided, and funded the unrest.
You are just such a troll, Jonathan. The timing does matter, as you charged Russia with starting the unrest in the Donbass. Specifically Wagner. Not even the SBU says that, as they don’t even claim the mercs were in the Donbass until after the conflict was fully engaged. And you are completely ignoring the article from Jacques Baud who is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, a specialist on Eastern countries, and the former NATO officer responsible for the fight against proliferation of small arms:
56 Russian fighters in the Donbass. Original arms came from deserted Ukrainian Army units. The guy in charge of finding Russian support, couldn’t. The Poles invented the intelligence. You are now going to be down to mere assertions. All the facts are completely against you. The Donbass War is not the fault of Russia. It is the fault of the Kiev regime. If Wagner is a bunch of Nazis, that is not our problem. We don’t fund them. The far-right in Ukraine is our problem. We funded them and set them up to provoke a war with Russia. It is time for that war to end.
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No, we don’t support the war, but we might be wrong. Or Myron might be wrong. In early February, Zelensky gave a speech that could be interpreted as warning that the Ukrainian military would be moving against the Donbas republics. After that, it appeared that there was concentration of troops to make that attack. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen. The real truth and lies about this war will be uncovered after the fact.
If there was an imminent threat, as Russia says, then the war may very well have prevented an actual genocide. This guy seems serious:
https://twitter.com/Angelo4justice3/status/1508487936144252929
Now interestingly, Scott Ritter published an interesting analysis of the campaign so far, and postulates that the end game all along might be to simply encircle and crush the troops opposite the Donbas.
https://twitter.com/RealScottRitter/status/1508813631311466496
Good analysis, and that may turn out to be true.
It is also worth following Ritter’s analysis of the concept of “pre-emption” and how it applies or might apply here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/29/russia-ukraine-the-law-of-war-crime-of-aggression/
Whether pre-emption holds water in the future (it is terribly flawed) or whether Russia’s claims to it are justified, all remain to be seen.
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An actual Nazi, unlike the ones in Ukraine? Those are fake? The in any case, the Wagner group didn’t start the war. We can’t condemn all Nazis now? We have to pick and choose good ones from the bad ones?
Maybe, but doubt it. Ukraine has three distinct linguistic dialects, apart from the Russian and other minorities. The Western is influenced by Polish, eastern by Russia, and one sort of in the middle. United it has never been. Watching Polish TV a few days ago, they were interviewing refugees from Mariupol. They were screaming about Azov beating them, locking them down, etc. They were clearly more upset with Azov than the Russians, whom the called (live on Polish TV) liberators. So how this war ends up affecting Ukrainian nationalism versus perhaps the nationalists getting blamed for their arrogance – who can say? Well, sure Jonathan, you can say with your immaculate crystal ball. But us mere humans can’t.
As for the denazifying, well he sure seems to have killed a bunch of them in Mariupol. What happens in Ukraine is not our business. Time to leave the field and let them make peace.
It doesn’t matter what your opinion is of Putin or this war, Jonathan. The only possible influence we have is here as citizens, voters, and some in our Orthodox circles. The truth will dribble out over the next few years, and we will have a clearer picture of what actually has happened.
In any case, the Wagner Group didn’t start the war? So Putin sent his Wagner Group mercenaries into Ukraine in early 2014 on a humanitarian mission?
It’s true that he got distracted by wars in Syria, Central African Republic, and a number of other places he had to have them fight in the meantime, so this time around they followed the regular army. But they were central to the unrest in Crimean and eastern Ukraine since the very beginning.
BOYD D. CATHEY: Jacques Baud, a retired colonel in the Swiss intelligence service, was variously a highly placed, major participant in NATO training operations in Ukraine. Over the years, he also had extensive dealings with his Russian counterparts. His long essay first appeared (in French) at the respected Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement. A literal translation appeared at The Postil (April 1, 2022). I have gone back to the original French and edited the article down some and rendered it, I hope, in more idiomatic English. I do not think in editing it I have damaged Baud’s fascinating account. For in a real sense, what he has done is “to let the cat out of the bag.”
In the past I’ve read accounts and reports that either confirm or in some way match the narrative that he offers. Some of these that I’ve written about or cited are by: Dr. John Mearsheimer, Archbishop Carlo Vigano, Glenn Greenwald, Sohrab Ahmari, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Mike Whitney, and others. But none of these writers has offered the first-hand, in depth, and comprehensive account as Colonel Baud, clearly and knowledgeably, has done.
It is still a bit lengthy, despite my editing. But I urge you to read and ponder Baud’s commentary. Along with the historical accounts of historian John Mearsheimer, it should be required reading for those zealous policy hawks, both in the GOP and the Democratic Party, who are pushing us into World War III
The Military Situation In The Ukraine
https://cf2r.org/documentation/la-situation-militaire-en-ukraine/
March 2022 BY Jacques Baud
Part One: The Road To War
For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I have worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying war, but of understanding what led us to it. [….]
Let’s try to examine the roots of the [Ukrainian] conflict. It starts with those who for the last eight years have been talking about “separatists” or “independentists” from Donbass. This is a misnomer. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность). The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language–because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine. A bit like if German putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).
At this stage, too rigid and engrossed in a doctrinaire approach to operations, the Ukrainian general staff subdued the enemy but without managing to actually prevail. The war waged by the autonomists [consisted in].… highly mobile operations conducted with light means. With a more flexible and less doctrinaire approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of Ukrainian forces to repeatedly “trap” them.
In 2014, when I was at NATO, I was responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we were trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels, to see if Moscow was involved. The information we received then came almost entirely from Polish intelligence services and did not “fit” with the information coming from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe]—and despite rather crude allegations, there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia.
The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery and anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.
But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive “anti-terrorist operation” (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements.
It is essential to recall here that Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Agreements (there are very few who actually have) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.
That is why since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded the implementation of the Minsk Agreements while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine. On the other side, the West—led by France—systematically tried to replace Minsk Agreements with the “Normandy format,” which put Russians and Ukrainians face-to-face. However, let us remember that there were never any Russian troops in the Donbass before 23-24 February 2022. Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass before then. For example, the U.S. intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. This was exactly comparable to the Swiss who went to fight in Bosnia on weekends, in the 1990s, or the French who go to fight in Ukraine today.
The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.
In fact, the Ukrainian army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Fall 2017” recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive.” Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly.
So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias…. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.
These militias had been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Even if one can argue about the term “Nazi,” the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic…[and] are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is revered in the Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France. [….]
The characterization of the Ukrainian paramilitaries as “Nazis” or “neo-Nazis” is considered Russian propaganda. But that’s not the view of the Times of Israel, or the West Point Academy’s Center for Counterterrorism. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them more with… the Islamic State. Take your pick!
So, the West supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014: rape, torture and massacres….
The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not at all accompanied by a “denazification,” as some claim.
In 2022, very schematically, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian offensive were organized as:
The Army, subordinated to the Ministry of Defense. It is organized into 3 army corps and composed of maneuver formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).
The National Guard, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior and is organized into 5 territorial commands.
The National Guard is therefore a territorial defense force that is not part of the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called “volunteer battalions” (добровольчі батальйоні), also known by the evocative name of “reprisal battalions,” and composed of infantry. Primarily trained for urban combat, they now defend cities such as Kharkov, Mariupol, Odessa, Kiev, etc.
Part Two: The War
As a former head of analysis of Warsaw Pact forces in the Swiss strategic intelligence service, I observe with sadness—but not astonishment—that our services are no longer able to understand the military situation in Ukraine. The self-proclaimed “experts” who parade on our TV screens tirelessly relay the same information modulated by the claim that Russia—and Vladimir Putin—is irrational. Let’s take a step back.
The Outbreak Of War
Since November 2021, the Americans have been constantly threatening a Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians at first did not seem to agree. Why not?
We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country. At the same time, several NATO exercises were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted several exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and to show that it was following the evolution of the situation.
Things calmed down until October-November with the end of the ZAPAD 21 exercises, whose troop movements were interpreted as a reinforcement for an offensive against Ukraine. However, even the Ukrainian authorities refuted the idea of Russian preparations for a war, and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukrainian Minister of Defense, states that there had been no change on its border since the spring.
In violation of the Minsk Agreements, Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press noted this, but not the Europeans; and no one condemned these violations.
In February 2022, events came to a head. On February 7, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed to Vladimir Putin his commitment to the Minsk Agreements, a commitment he would repeat after his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky the next day. But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisors to the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended without any concrete result: the Ukrainians still refused to apply the Minsk Agreements, apparently under pressure from the United States. Vladimir Putin noted that Macron had made empty promises and that the West was not ready to enforce the agreements, the same opposition to a settlement it had exhibited for eight years.
Ukrainian preparations in the contact zone continued. The Russian Parliament became alarmed; and on February 15 it asked Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he initially refused to do.
On 17 February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass had increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened. It would be said later that this was Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke a Russian intervention.
At the same time, there were reports of sabotage in the Donbass. On 18 January, Donbass fighters intercepted saboteurs, who spoke Polish and were equipped with Western equipment and who were seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could have been CIA mercenaries, led or “advised” by Americans and composed of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbass Republics.
In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun intense shelling the civilian population of Donbass, forcing Vladimir Putin to make a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international obligation of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P). But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions. Therefore, whether Russian intervention were limited to the Donbass or went further to put pressure on the West over the status of the Ukraine, the price to pay would be the same. This is what he explained in his speech on February 21. On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention seem totally illegal in the eyes of the public, Western powers deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware.
In his speech of February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: “demilitarize” and “denazify” the Ukraine. So, it was not a question of taking over Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it.
From then on, our knowledge of the course of the operation is limited: the Russians have excellent security for their operations (OPSEC) and the details of their planning are not known. But fairly quickly, the course of the operation allows us to understand how the strategic objectives were translated on the operational level.
Demilitarization:
ground destruction of Ukrainian aviation, air defense systems and reconnaissance assets;
neutralization of command and intelligence structures (C3I), as well as the main logistical routes in the depth of the territory;
encirclement of the bulk of the Ukrainian army massed in the southeast of the country.
Denazification:
destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in the cities of Odessa, Kharkov, and Mariupol, as well as in various facilities in the territory.
Demilitarization
The Russian offensive was carried out in a very “classic” manner. Initially—as the Israelis had done in 1967—with the destruction on the ground of the air force in the very first hours. Then, we witnessed a simultaneous progression along several axes according to the principle of “flowing water”: advance everywhere where resistance was weak and leave the cities (very demanding in terms of troops) for later. In the north, the Chernobyl power plant was occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers guarding the plant together are of course not shown.
The idea that Russia is trying to take over Kiev, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, comes typically from the West…. But Vladimir Putin never intended to shoot or topple Zelensky. Instead, Russia seeks to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate, by surrounding Kiev. The Russians want to obtain the neutrality of Ukraine.
Many Western commentators were surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution while conducting military operations. The explanation lies in the Russian strategic outlook since the Soviet era. For the West, war begins when politics ends. However, the Russian approach follows a Clausewitzian inspiration: war is the continuity of politics and one can move fluidly from one to the other, even during combat. This allows one to create pressure on the adversary and push him to negotiate.
From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of previous military action and planning: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.
The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country in preparation for a major operation against the Donbass. This is why Russian forces were able to encircle it from the beginning of March in the “cauldron” between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, with a thrust from the East through Kharkov and another from the South from Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) Republics are complementing the Russian forces with a push from the East.
At this stage, Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under any time pressure or schedule. Their demilitarization goal is all but achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.
The “slowdown” that our “experts” attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved their objectives. Russia does not want to engage in an occupation of the entire Ukrainian territory. In fact, it appears that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the linguistic border of the country.
Our media speak of indiscriminate bombardments against the civilian population, especially in Kharkov, and horrific images are widely broadcast. However, Gonzalo Lira, a Latin American correspondent who lives there, presents us with a calm city on March 10 and March 11. It is true that it is a large city and we do not see everything—but this seems to indicate that we are not in the total war that we are served continuously on our TV screens. As for the Donbass Republics, they have “liberated” their own territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.
Denazification
In cities like Kharkov, Mariupol and Odessa, the Ukrainian defense is provided by the paramilitary militias. They know that the objective of “denazification” is aimed primarily at them. For an attacker in an urbanized area, civilians are a problem. This is why Russia is seeking to create humanitarian corridors to empty cities of civilians and leave only the militias, to fight them more easily.
Conversely, these militias seek to keep civilians in the cities from evacuating in order to dissuade the Russian army from fighting there. This is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and do everything to ensure that Russian efforts are unsuccessful—they use the civilian population as “human shields.” Videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and beaten up by fighters of the Azov regiment are of course carefully censored by the Western media.
On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State [ISIS] and subject to the platform’s “policy on dangerous individuals and organizations.” It was therefore forbidden to glorify its activities, and “posts” that were favorable to it were systematically banned. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts favorable to the militia. In the same spirit, in March, the platform authorized, in the former Eastern countries, calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values that inspire our leaders.
Our media propagate a romantic image of popular resistance by the Ukrainian people. It is this image that led the European Union to finance the distribution of arms to the civilian population. In my capacity as head of peacekeeping at the UN, I worked on the issue of civilian protection. We found that violence against civilians occurred in very specific contexts. In particular, when weapons are abundant and there are no command structures.
These command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force towards an objective. By arming citizens in a haphazard manner, as is currently the case, the EU is turning them into combatants, with the consequential effect of making them potential targets. Moreover, without command, without operational goals, the distribution of arms leads inevitably to settling of scores, banditry and actions that are more deadly than effective. War becomes a matter of emotions. Force becomes violence. This is what happened in Tawarga (Libya) from 11 to 13 August 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were massacred with weapons parachuted (illegally) by France. By the way, the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (RUSI) does not see any added value in these arms deliveries.
Moreover, by delivering arms to a country at war, one exposes oneself to being considered a belligerent. The Russian strikes of March 13, 2022, against the Mykolayev air base follow Russian warnings that arms shipments would be treated as hostile targets.
The EU is repeating the disastrous experience of the Third Reich in the final hours of the Battle of Berlin. War must be left to the military and when one side has lost, it must be admitted. And if there is to be resistance, it must be led and structured. But we are doing exactly the opposite—we are pushing citizens to go and fight, and at the same time, Facebook authorizes calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values that inspire us.
Some intelligence services see this irresponsible decision as a way to use the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder to fight Vladimir Putin’s Russia…. It would have been better to engage in negotiations and thus obtain guarantees for the civilian population than to add fuel to the fire. It is easy to be combative with the blood of others.
The Maternity Hospital At Mariupol
It is important to understand beforehand that it is not the Ukrainian army that is defending Mariupol, but the Azov militia, composed of foreign mercenaries.
In its March 7, 2022 summary of the situation, the Russian UN mission in New York stated that “Residents report that Ukrainian armed forces expelled staff from the Mariupol city birth hospital No. 1 and set up a firing post inside the facility.” On March 8, the independent Russian media Lenta.ru, published the testimony of civilians from Mariupol who told that the maternity hospital was taken over by the militia of the Azov regiment, and who drove out the civilian occupants by threatening them with their weapons. They confirmed the statements of the Russian ambassador a few hours earlier.
The hospital in Mariupol occupies a dominant position, perfectly suited for the installation of anti-tank weapons and for observation. On 9 March, Russian forces struck the building. According to CNN, 17 people were wounded, but the images do not show any casualties in the building and there is no evidence that the victims mentioned are related to this strike. There is talk of children, but in reality, there is nothing. This does not prevent the leaders of the EU from seeing this as a war crime. And this allows Zelensky to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
In reality, we do not know exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces struck a position of the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was then free of civilians.
The problem is that the paramilitary militias that defend the cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the rules of war. It seems that the Ukrainians have replayed the scenario of the Kuwait City maternity hospital in 1990, which was totally staged by the firm Hill & Knowlton for $10.7 million in order to convince the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
Western politicians have accepted civilian strikes in the Donbass for eight years without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law towards their goal of weakening Russia.
Part Three: Conclusions
As an ex-intelligence professional, the first thing that strikes me is the total absence of Western intelligence services in accurately representing the situation over the past year…. In fact, it seems that throughout the Western world intelligence services have been overwhelmed by the politicians. The problem is that it is the politicians who decide—the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision-maker does not listen. This is what has happened during this crisis.
That said, while a few intelligence services had a very accurate and rational picture of the situation, others clearly had the same picture as that propagated by our media… The problem is that, from experience, I have found them to be extremely bad at the analytical level—doctrinaire, they lack the intellectual and political independence necessary to assess a situation with military “quality.”
Second, it seems that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately responded ideologically to the situation. That is why this crisis has been irrational from the beginning. It should be noted that all the documents that were presented to the public during this crisis were presented by politicians based on commercial sources.
Some Western politicians obviously wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the UN Security Council were only the product of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him—he did exactly as Donald Rumsfeld did in 2002, who “bypassed” the CIA and other intelligence services that were much less assertive about Iraqi chemical weapons.
The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:
on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
In other words, we can naturally deplore and condemn the Russian attack. But WE (that is: the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions for a conflict to break out. We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the two million refugees. That is fine. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who sought refuge in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.
[….]
Whether the term “genocide” applies to the abuses suffered by the people of Donbass is an open question. The term is generally reserved for cases of greater magnitude (Holocaust, etc.). But the definition given by the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply to this case.
Clearly, this conflict has led us into hysteria. Sanctions seem to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policies. If we had insisted that Ukraine abide by the Minsk Agreements, which we had negotiated and endorsed, none of this would have happened. Vladimir Putin’s condemnation is also ours. There is no point in whining afterwards—we should have acted earlier. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as guarantor and member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have respected their commitments. In the end, the real defeat is that of those who have no voice.
The European Union was unable to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements—on the contrary, it did not react when Ukraine was bombing its own population in the Donbass. Had it done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Absent from the diplomatic phase, the EU distinguished itself by fueling the conflict. On February 27, the Ukrainian government agreed to enter into negotiations with Russia. But a few hours later, the European Union voted a budget of 450 million euros to supply arms to the Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire. From then on, the Ukrainians felt that they did not need to reach an agreement. The resistance of the Azov militia in Mariupol even led to a boost of 500 million euros for weapons.
In Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia. This militia is associated with the Mirotvorets website, which lists the “enemies of Ukraine,” with their personal data, addresses and telephone numbers, so that they can be harassed or even eliminated; a practice that is punishable in many countries, but not in the Ukraine. The UN and some European countries have demanded the closure of this site—but that demand was refused by the Rada [Ukrainian parliament].
In the end, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. We have pushed him into the arms of China. His ties with Beijing have solidified. China is emerging as a mediator in the conflict…. The Americans have to ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse they have put themselves in—and the United States has to piteously backtrack on the sanctions imposed on its enemies.
Western ministers who seek to collapse the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer, or even call for the assassination of Putin, show (even if they have partially reversed the form of their words, but not the substance!) that our leaders are no better than those we hate—sanctioning Russian athletes in the Para-Olympic Games or Russian artists has nothing to do with fighting Putin. [….]
What makes the conflict in Ukraine more blameworthy than our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? What sanctions have we adopted against those who deliberately lied to the international community in order to wage unjust, unjustified and murderous wars?….Have we adopted a single sanction against the countries, companies or politicians who are supplying weapons to the conflict in Yemen, considered to be the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world?”
To ask the question is to answer it… and the answer is not pretty.
Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in the Sudan. He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine. He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, in particular Le Détournement published by SIGEST, Gouverner par les fake news , L’affaire Navalny . His latest book is Poutine, maître du jeu? published by Max Milo.
This article appears through the gracious courtesy of Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement, Paris.
Incredible that in that entire account, he never mentions the role or even the presence of the Wagner Group or any other Russian mercenaries. He downplays the # of Russian soldiers that were fighting in eastern Ukraine without even acknowledging all of the Russian paramilitaries that were fighting there. Even you acknowledge that Wagner Group was fighting in eastern Ukraine by May 2014 (and they were training/funding/supplying rebels months before that). Nor does he acknowledge the Russian supplying of military equipment, such as the missile launcher that shot down MH-17. It seems to be an attempt to completely whitewash Russia’s leading role in the conflict.
Colonel Baud did mention them.
According to the information from Colonel Baud, there was not a significant number of mercs in Donbass. I do not acknowledge the Wagner Group was there. The claim from SBU is that Wagner entered the fray well after the conflict had begun. That was countering your claim they started the conflict. Which, even if they were there, is patently not true. The timeline does not work. So you try to move the goal posts. We have seen no hard evidence that they were there. These are claims by the SBU, which Colonel Baud says was lying and finally came clean that there were maybe 56 foreign troops. And no, there is no evidence they were ” training/funding/supplying rebels months before that”. In fact, quite the opposite. Did the Donbass fighters get Russian support, which Baud says did not happen, or did they simply inherit Ukrainian weapons from Russian-speaking troops that switched sides?
You read the article, right? Given that NATO is dangerous, that NATO has been treating Ukraine as a de facto member, that Zelensky openly signaled the desire to develop nukes, given the biolabs funded by the US in Ukraine, the ongoing murders in the Donbas and the potential for a Ukrainian invasion there, then there is every reason to believe that Patriarch Kirill believes the war to be justified. We don’t necessarily agree that the war had to happen now, nor do we have to support the way in which it is conducted. But if the tables were turned, and we faced the same situation with Mexico, then we would have to think long and hard about how we would respond.
We do not support foreign wars. In fact, all of us would support massive cuts to our own Defense budget and the spending of those savings on domestic programs.
What is clearly immoral is NATO’s use of Ukraine to try and destabilize Russia. President Biden in his dementia said the quiet part out loud. This has always been about regime change in Russia. The president just put it out there, and now the tension is even higher. The US had no business providing weapons to Ukraine. We had no business sponsoring a coup in 2014. We have no business prolonging this war. If you look at the situation objectively, NATO are the architects of this war and we are leaving the Ukrainians to die for our desire to harm Russia.
We have zero control over Russia or Patriarch Kirill. Focusing on condemning them is simply deflecting. We need to get out. We need to get out of the conflict in Yemen and every other conflict in which American money and equipment is being used to slaughter. We should have at least some influence over our own government, right? That should be our task – to get our own house in order. The Russians and Ukrainians need to be allowed to negotiate an end to this in good faith. They will have to live together after it is over, and we’ll still be thousands of miles away.
Also, you did read the sections on Zelensky? 11 political parties banned now, and two bills going through the Rada to ban the UOC and Metropolitan Onuphry, even though the UOC has denounced the war. Not looking very “democratic.” Certainly not a system we want our taxes and blood used to defend.
Archbishop Sotirios has his own tag: https://orthodoxreflections.com/tag/sotirios/
We have been publishing articles from Greek Canadians about Archbishop Sotirios since mid-2020. All of them have been submitted by members of the Greek Archdiocese in Canada. They live under his rule. They know him personally. They have talked to him. Entreated with him. The Greek Archdiocese has lost probably 30% of its members, despite being a very “ethic” Church with many immigrants. You can read through the articles and see the pain and suffering caused by his actions. This is not a new situation.
Now, compare Greek Canadians writing about what is happening in their own church with their own bishop to you making assumptions about Patriarch Kirill based on Western media reporting. You don’t live in Russia. You don’t have a Russian bishop. You don’t know the situation on the ground. You probably don’t speak Russian, and even if you did, there is no guarantee that Russian-language media is not full of propaganda. You have no base of knowledge other than what you read. Very different situation.
The multiple spoons situation has caused a lot of havoc in Canada. You can read the articles on our site for yourself – all written by Greek Canadians. The Greek Canadians do not see this as a minor thing. Here are even more articles on the topic.
https://orthodoxreflections.com/category/canada-single-spoon-communion-petition/
And we already discussed Patriarch Kirill at length. We need a cease fire and a negotiated settlement, things that all of the Public Orthodoxy-types do not even mention in their condemnations. There can be no military victory for either side. Russia will not tolerate a loss. The Russians will completely destroy Kiev and other major cities first. The hardliners will want to use tactical nukes if necessary. That is a catastrophe. Ukraine is incapable of offensive action, but even fighting to a stalemate ends up with a massive loss. This can’t be allowed to happen.
NATO is keeping Zelensky from making necessary concessions. That must end.
If you wrote a balanced article condemning all sides including the recklessness of the government of Ukraine, the Russian invasion, NATO provoking and prolonging this war, the Azov and other Nazis, the OCU with its ultranationalism, the Zelensky govt’s actions against human rights, the ongoing murder of Russians in the Donbas, the interference of the Patriarch of Constantinople in the affairs of the UOC, and the sanctions that are impoverishing the planet – then we would actually run that. To date, no one has written such an article that we are aware of. Most articles are simply anti-Russian and anti-ROC of the type “Putin is insane, Patriarch Kirill is a KGB asset, and Ukraine is perfect!” Our coverage has centered around four facts:
The first paragraph is a gish gallop of unsupported falsehoods. NATO is never going to invade Russia and is not “dangerous” to the Russian nation, such an action would be so obviously foolhardly and pointless to all involved that it’s ridiculous to treat it like a serious possibility. Putin has harmed Russia more by invading Ukraine than NATO will ever harm it. Ukraine is not a “de facto” member of NATO, made obvious by the fact that no NATO soldiers were stationed in Ukraine when Russia attacked and no NATO soldiers are fighting Russia in Ukraine at this very moment, as would be true of a NATO member. Suggesting that biological research facilities put Russia in any dangerous whatsoever is ridiculous conspiracy-mongering – and once again leads me to ask, after all the times that Putin has lied to you, why do you still take his claims seriously? Putin literally started the murdering in the Donbas when he invaded with his Wagner Group and their neo-Nazi leader Dmitry Utkin in 2014, if he wants peace there all he has to do is pull out his men and support and it would become peaceful again like it was before 2014.
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Do you believe that Patriarch Kirill is as naive as to believe all the random throw-it-against-the wall propaganda that comes from Putin? Do you really think so little of his discernment? Seriously – nukes, nazis, bioweapons, genocide – if this was a cheap TV script you’d think it was over the top. Any two of those would be ridiculous, Putin is trying to sell all four simultaneously, just like the many other lies he’s tried to sell. Do you still believe Putin when he says it’s not a war? When he said that he was only running training exercises and not planning to invade? When he said that he didn’t have men in Donbas, that he didn’t have men in Crimea, that his allies didn’t shoot down MH-17? When his enemies and critics die left and right, poisoned in the most obvious ways with his agents always right there in the vicinity, do you believe him when he claims to have nothing to do with it? When will you stop believing him?
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That’s just dealing with the first paragraph. I’m already too exhausted to do any more. I guess this is why you keep reverting to Gish Gallop – it certainly is effective at wearing down the conversation partner.
Did you envision NATO bombing Libya? The operation in Syria, including troops and bases? 20 years in Afghanistan? Still keeping bases in Iraq, despite being asked to leave?
No one cares what you think, Jonathan Hill. Or what we think for that matter. Not in Russia at any rate. Russia has repeatedly said since the dumb idea was floated in 2008 that NATO troops on its border is considered an existential threat. The Russians have repeated this incessantly. Ukraine is a corrupt, kleptocracy and if it were in NATO could easily have gotten us into WWIII. Look at the belligerency of smaller NATO members like Estonia. A crappy country with a big attitude could easily get the entire alliance into a war over a border dispute or a pipeline or some other beef.
Add in the fact that open warfare is not the only way to be a pain-the-side of a large power, and it should have been clear to the entire world that dangling NATO membership out there was a major, unforgivable blunder. We put a great power in a corner, and ended up getting people killed. This should never have happened.
Ukraine has received 2.5 billion dollars in lethal arms from the U.S., starting under a very stupid Trump admin. As noted in the article itself “The US military helped run a long-standing, publicly acknowledged training program for Ukrainian troops in the country’s western region. That program included instruction in how to use Javelin anti-tank missiles and sniper training. Yahoo News reported about the CIA’s secret U.S.-based training initiative for Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. That program, which began in 2015, also included instruction in firearms, camouflage techniques and covert communications. Yahoo News’ prior report also revealed that CIA paramilitaries had traveled to eastern Ukraine to assist forces loyal to Kiev in their fight against Donetsk and Lugansk.”
We had advisors, trainers, and it appears that our “advisors” saw engagement. We have seen reports that we still have advisors with Ukrainian forces, but with everything going on there is no confirmation of that.
Who gets that kind of military aid, support, and training? Has Putin harmed Russia more than NATO ever would? Well, we wouldn’t be in this mess at all if NATO would have stayed away. But there is a really great chance Russia comes out of this better than it went in. Closer to China, closer to India, more self-sufficient, an end to the Petrodollar, Europe on its knees begging for fuel. Or not. There is no way to know how this is going to turn out, but given the damage to the USD and our looming food crisis, Russia could get out this better than we do.
The war needs to end, now, for everyone’s sake.
In the last 3 decades, the US has spent 100 billion USD on bioweapons programs. That is just what we know about. As a Marine, I had to do 2 weeks of CBW training back in the 80’s. Clearly the US believes that bioweapons work. What are the biolabs, and what was their purpose? They were funded by the US, and used by American resources. Why did Victoria Nuland in Congressional testimony say that we were concerned Russia could capture them? What is in there? Did Russia know about them prior to the invasion? Did their existence play a role in the decision to invade?
Why did Hunter Biden have a role, according to the Daily Mail, in funding at least one of the labs? What was this all about?
None of the information included came from Putin. The information was from America sources including public testimony and released DoD information. Why are you so incurious about the labs, Jonathan? You don’t have any answers, but you are certain there is nothing to see here?
The Wagner group are definite bad guys. Of course, we don’t fund them with my tax dollars, so that is a relief for once. Whatever they do isn’t on our head. The Wagner presence was never more than a few thousand. The Wagner entered a brewing civil war, they didn’t start it. The Russians in the new republics do not want to live under Kiev. Their status must be accepted by Ukraine and be part of the peace deal.
You tell me. Is he a plotting ex-KGB agent who is beholden to Putin and twists the Orthodox Faith into a pretzel to serve his master? Is he a true believer that Russia faced an existential threat? Is he influenced by propaganda, and so does not have a clear picture?
You don’t speak Russian, Jonathan. You don’t live in Russia. You are viewing this from a distance through a lens of Western media that is inherently biased. Same as us, except that we can also have recourse to Polish media which can be surprising. Still, we can’t tell you what is going on in his head or the heads of the various synodal bishops. It is quite clear that many of our bishops in the West have fallen victim to propaganda pumped out on CNN, why not Kirill to Russian propaganda?
Try some humility for a change. You don’t know any better than we do what a hierarch thousands of miles away with whom you have no contact is thinking. All we have are possibilities.
Nukes – we referenced the and provided a link to the speech in which Zelensky speculated about Ukraine acquiring nukes. at the Munich conference. Do you believe that was acceptable? How would America react to Mexico announcing it would acquire nukes from China?
Nazis – we still on this? There are no Nazis in Ukraine? This is a very good link that names currently serving Rada members with Nazi ties, and gives a great overview of the Nazi influence in Ukraine at all levels.
https://thesaker.is/just-a-handful-not-relevant-yet/
We also put information in the article.
Bioweapons – Real labs, top secret, no oversite, confirmed by American information, no clue what they were up to but Victoria Nuland was sure worried about them.
Genocide – Russians in the Donbas were not shelled or harmed? The word genocide is often misused, and it probably is here to. Mass murder of civilians with documented atrocities certainly sums it up.
Oh definitely, this is a war. And we need a ceasefire and negotiations to end the war. We need a realistic peace deal, which means NATO and the United States have to get out of the way and let them reach accord. Not our fight, not our war, we need to stop prolonging the agony. There is nothing any of us can say or do that will make any difference to Putin or his aims. What we have some very tiny influence over is our own government, which needs to stop pouring gasoline on a fire.
We didn’t vote for Putin. We wouldn’t vote for Putin. He’s a liar? How is that America’s problem, unless we make it our problem? Xi is a liar and a murderer, and his crimes really may amount to genocide. The Saudis are liars and murderers. We fund and support their murders. We deal with bad people running countries all the time. We believe what he says are the reasons he invaded, because they make sense for a Great Power and analysts warned us about them for years. We believe his peace offers, because they solidify existing policies. Beyond that? Trust but verify. He will keep a deal if it is the deal he wants.
We do our best. “Gish Gallop” – that phrase makes us wonder if you were a debate geek in either high school, college, or both.
By the way, the worst TV script of all is the steady Ukrainian propaganda, right down to Zelensky in front of a green screen. Just cringe, but Americans and the West just eat that up.
You compare the plausibility of invading Russia with the plausibility of invading Libya, yet wish to be taken seriously? And you mistakenly killed your next argument – you can’t simultaneously call Ukraine a de facto member of NATO and then claim that if Ukraine was in NATO it would have gotten us into World War III.
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What is the name for an argument that consists of a long list of disingenuous questions in order to suggest plausibility for a conspiracy, when you full well know the actual answer to most of those questions? If I was a “debate geek” I likely would know that answer – no idea what work you think that random attempt at an insult did to the conversation. I was a scientist turned servant of the church, never was interested in anything as inane as debate for the sake of debate.
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The Wagner Group entered Ukraine a full 3 months before the event that Myron claimed “sparked the war”. Putin did not send neo-Nazi mercenaries into Ukraine to spread the love of Christ. You cannot claim they entered a civil war when none existed. He sent them there TO spark the war, obviously. War is what they do.
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“Try some humility” is a ripe suggestion considering the nature of this blog. I refuse to be so arrogant as to believe that I am more capable of getting information about the world than Kirill is. If at this point he is still falling prey to Russian propaganda, then he deserves to be criticized for it. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” How many fools is Putin up to now? Is he still running that mere training exercise he told us not to worry about?
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“nukes, nazis, bioweapons, genocide” was a list of supposed reasons that Putin went into Ukraine. They’re all laughable. No, Ukraine does not have nukes or bioweapons nor are they acquiring any nor are they in the slightest danger of ever using such to pose a threat to Putin, and he knows that. Yes, there are nazis in Ukraine as there are in every majority-white nation including Russia, but if you believed for a second that Putin actually went into Ukraine to “deNazify” it then you’re extraordinarily gullible on two counts – first because if he cared about deNazification then he would “denazify” his own Wagner Group first, and second because anyone with the slightest knowledge of war knows that invading a nation intensifies nationalist sentiment, it doesn’t eliminate it. And no, there is no genocide in Donbas, and the civil war in Donbas was started and egged on by Putin this entire time.
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You’re constantly suggesting that we have no responsibility to speak up when it comes to the Orthodox Church, but that all our responsibility lies as Americans. That’s backwards – we have MORE reason to hold our Orthodox leaders accountable than our secular leaders. I don’t doubt for a moment that secular politicians will betray the faith I adhere to. But I’m supposed to just accept it and be silent when Orthodox leaders do so? I care far more what the Orthodox church does than what any secular ruler does, because only the Church, not secular power, can save us. Can Kirill move Putin’s hand? Of anyone who could, he is the one I have the most hope would have the moral compass to actually do it. His responsibility in this moment is absolutely overwhelming. Even if there is only a 1% chance he could end the war, it is his duty to God and to the Church to do so. Perhaps he will be Nathan, perhaps he will only be Micaiah. Either way he must serve God.
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“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Russia has been very clear since the Bush Administration was stupid enough to bring it up – NATO troops in Ukraine is a red line. Ukraine certainly believed that the level of aid, the training programs, the embedding of NATO “advisors” all added up to being better protected than they turned out to be. Why wouldn’t Zelensky believe that, after all who gets that kind of military aid from the US? (Thanks Trump)
All those things upset the Bear. But “de facto” does not give you an Article 5 guarantee. So we poked the Bear, we encouraged Zelensky to poke the Bear, then we don’t go to war because we don’t have to. Instead, we keep feeding them military equipment to encourage this war to continue. The war should end in a negotiated settlement. We are only prolonging this conflict, getting more people killed and making us all poorer.
As noted, your opinion on the danger of NATO troops on the Russian border is irrelevant. The Russians consider NATO in Ukraine to be an existential threat. NATO has a history of attacking other countries. If Mexico were being armed by China, and hosted Chinese military advisors, we would make Mexico into a smoking ruin. That is simply the way Great Powers work.
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What conspiracy? There is no need for any conspiracies. The Globalists do everything in the open. They write books, give lectures.
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The problem you have, Jonathan, is timing.
The Kiev military campaign launched on April 15, 2014 against the Donbass.
May 10 and May 11, 2014, in referenda, the residents of Lugansk, Donetsk, and Mariupol Ukraine voted in favor of independence from the Kiev.
According to the SBU (Ukraine’s security service), Wagner PMCs were initially deployed to eastern Ukraine on 21 May 2014.
The war started on 4/15. Lugansk and Donetsk declared independence on 5/10 and 5/11. Wagner shows up on 5/21 to support already declared independent states.
Which means that the Wagner PMCs, no matter how evil they may be, are not responsible for the civil war. They joined it in progress.
Ukraine doesn’t even claim the Wagner Group showed up 3 months before the fighting commenced. You invented that.
But in the end, none of that actually matters. Fair or not fair, Russia is a Great Power and this was the inevitable result of encouraging Ukraine in its policies. The suppression of Russia language and culture, the ongoing fighting in the Donbass while ignoring Minsk I and II agreements, the continued program of improving arms. Ukraine must sue for peace. NATO has to get out and stay out.
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You have zero idea what is going on in Pat. Kirill’s head. Hence, have some humility. You also have zero idea what is going on in Putin’s head and the heads of the Russian MoD. In fact, you don’t know any more than the rest of us what the actual Russian aims are, though based on what is happening now, destroying the Ukrainians forces in front of the Donbass is a good bet.
You also don’t have a clue what is going in Russia or in the Russian Synod. Putin is going to win this war. Ukraine will surrender. Better to get it over with now and avoid any more pain and suffering. The war is hugely popular with the Russian people, and there seems to be every indication that Patriarch Kirill supports the war. You can easily make a case for the war from the Russian side. Once all the facts are out, it will be clearer whether it was justified or not. In any case, NATO bears strong guilt for this war.
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Ukraine has no nukes. On 2/23 Zelensky suggested that the Budapest Memorandum could be abandoned and that Ukraine could pursue nukes. Which, is not an empty threat. https://www.dailywire.com/news/president-zelensky-suggests-ukraine-may-pursue-nuclear-weapons-to-counter-russia-putin-responds
If he was trying to start a war, he couldn’t have done a better job. Talking about acquiring nukes was a dumb idea, unless you want a war. What was he trying to do? Blackmail NATO into extending an Article 5 guarantee as the price for not going nuclear? So, Jonathan, no one ever said Ukraine had nukes at this time. We were very clear and you are very disingenuous in presenting what was plainly written. And yes, nukes in the hands of Ukrainians is a threat to Russia.
Bioweapons – What we said is we don’t have a clue what these were about and we have questions that need answering.
Pick a day, story changes. Our tax dollars supported these labs. What was their purpose? Did Russia know about them? Did they figure into Russia’s decision to invade? Again, why are you not curious Jonathan, being a scientist and all?
The Russian Nazis are not our issue. We don’t fund them. We don’t give them weapons. We don’t look the other way while they abuse Ukrainians and Russian who oppose them. We should never have funded Nazis. We should not fund them now. We should never fund them in the future. Why is this unclear?
The only place any of us have ever encountered Nazis was Poland. Been all over Europe, in which all the countries are majority white, and never seen a Nazi.
It is quite clear that Russia is trying to fight in a very controlled way, and that Ukrainian Nazis are running amok in a number of places. Will this build Ukrainian nationalism or further divide the country? That is an outcome you can’t predict at this moment. Remember humility? You are lecturing military veterans on war and its aftermath. We can’t tell you what the outcome of the war will be. You have zero clue.
We have posted evidence of the mass murder and ongoing war in the Donbass. The Russians clearly believe it was real, and by that we mean the general public. In addition, Patriarch Kirill has referenced it, so this is accepted wisdom on the Russian side. In addition, Russia encouraged the Minsk I and II agreements which were never respected by Kiev. Strange that if Russia wanted to encourage the war, it would have tried to so hard to end it. And we already covered the Wagner timeline, so you are quite off base.
No one is going to listen to you. Putin has the Ruble above pre-sanction value. Putin is waging full-scale economic counter warfare and winning. And we are losing. The dollar is going to lose, and with that our privileged position in the world economy. Putin doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion in the West. Patriarch Kirill does not care about your opinion either. He has a huge Church. Patriarch Bartholomew has a few thousand in his domestic flock. He is completely dependent on Western funding and assistance to even survive in office. He cares a ton what Westerners think. Patriarch Kirill does not.
So you are talking to Westerners only. The Russians don’t care. Actually, more than the Russians don’t care. The Jerusalem Patriarchate does not care, the Antiochian Patriarchate doesn’t care. Neither does Serbia. Add to that the entire Global South on the political front.
By all means, condemn away all you want. You are shouting into an echo chamber. What we did in Ukraine we must never do again. We have some influence on our own nation, as long as the votes are legit. Long term, NATO meddling, bombing, and exporting democracy are horrible, anti-human policies that the world has decided to turn against. We need to mend our ways. That should be our focus.
The global attitude towards our hypocrisy is summed up by an Orthodox Bishop from Jerusalem:
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You can’t do a thing about the Russian Church. It isn’t yours and you really don’t know anything about it. We are not salt, we are maniacs who need repentance. So focus on here and now.
I did not “make up” that Wagner mercenaries entered Ukraine in February 2014. They entered Crimea first, helped to orchestrate the annexation there, and then in March sparked the further rebellion in other provinces. They were already communicating with, training, and providing funding and weapons to the pro-Russia rebels there. I don’t know what day they first physically entered those particular provinces but they were already in Ukraine and sparking the violence long before May.
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And yes, your bioweapons labs in Ukraine claim is a conspiracy theory for which you have yet to offer up the slightest bit of serious evidnece. The suggestion that the USA would run a bunch of bioweapons labs in a country as poor and vulnerable as Ukraine, at the time that Russia was already actively supporting an ongoing rebellion, at a moment when there were serious concerns Russia would take that land, is a claim that defies logic and shouldn’t be made without serious evidence, which you lack. (Then again, you’re still unwilling to back off the claim that vaccines are more deadly than Covid, so…)
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honestly, I tire of this. It’s quite clear that you’ve picked your sides on all of these issues and don’t change no matter what the evidence.
The SBU says Wagner was there in late Feb after the war started. That blows away you claiming that Russia began the conflict. Even the SBU admits that is not the case, the war was fully engaged before they arrived. Assuming they did arrive, which there has been doubt cast on that narrative by expert testimony that says there were never a substantial amount of Russian troops / mercs in the Donbass.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. There was no reason for Kiev to violate Minsk I & II and to escalate combat action in Feb 2022, other than to provoke a war. A war Ukraine can’t win, and needs to end immediately through negotiations that respect Russia’s security demands. The vote in 2014 did not demand full independence for the Donbass. They have now escalated that demand after 8 years of war. These are simply facts.
What does an Orthodox jurisdiction pay you for that does not require reading comprehension? See below from the article directly above:
The author did not use the word “bioweapons” at all. The word was “biolaboratories.” Which is totally confirmed, even in Congressional testimony.
From the Independent in the UK:
What are the facilities, what were they researching, and why were our tax dollars funding them? Why was Nuland concerned about the Russians getting their hands on pathogens here? Why were the locals kept in the dark? These are called questions, Jonathan, an essential part of finding new information. We don’t know that these were bioweapons facilities. Then again, the constantly changing denials from the US don’t exactly reassure us. So we want a thorough independent look into them. And as for untoward behavior – Ukraine is exactly the place to locate something you want to keep hidden. It is massively corrupt, and the locals can be bought for low dollars. Poverty encourages you to look the other way. In Poland, Nicholas once got free international calling in his Uni office for two years by bribing the phone guy the equivalent of 10 bucks. Don’t be a hater, he wasn’t Orthodox then.
Same thing with the funded Gain of Function in Wuhan. Keep it overseas, pay some bucks, no one asks questions. Well, we are asking questions. What are these labs all about?
And we aren’t claiming the vaccines killed more people than COVID. If you read through all that have said talking you, Jonathan, we need to pause any additional COVID vaccines and do thorough, exhaustive studies of what we know.
You and us both, especially since you constantly misrepresent us in our own comments section. The War in Ukraine is being purposefully prolonged in the hopes that it will bleed out Russia and maybe lead to regime change. The war is not in Ukraine’s interests, and the only way to end it is to negotiate. Zelensky is boxed in by the US, the ultranationalists, and his own Oligarchic support. Who knows? He may want to save lives and do a deal. Hard to tell. Or he could be a soulless actor playing the role he was hired for. All the evidence points to NATO (US really) wanting to provoke this war.
The only way it ends is with a negotiated settlement. Russia has put the terms on the table, and they have not changed. If you “stand with Ukraine” to keep fighting, then that is pointless blood on your hands. If NATO continues its war crimes propaganda onslaught, we may end up with a groundswell of public opinion for direct conflict. Russia has indicated a direct conflict with Western troops leads to nuclear war.
At this point, all that matters is a negotiated deal, something our government is committed to not allowing. That means we risk destroying the planet, and we risk watching people starve to death over sanctions. Really and truly, no clue what you want, Jonathan. We can’t be any clearer about the situation in Ukraine.
Also, I thought “Jonathan Hill” was a typo at first, but you seem to have been repeating it now. Is that supposed to be some sort of obscure reference? I’m not getting it.
We have dealt with a Jonathan Hill across many social media platforms. He also has a history of working for an Orthodox ministry. Possible ministries. He sounds almost exactly like you. So if you are not him, then our bad. The resemblance in writing style and argumentation is really uncanny. If you say your aren’t him, we won’t bring it up again.
Often, the delusion in the hierarchy makes its way to the parishioner. Yes, criticism of the Russian Patriarch is a sign of delusion. All sin is delusion, all sin is conspiracy, and the world’s system is a conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy because that is the nature of evil. St John’s monsters had many heads.
At some point things go beyond the point of return. Like the children of Israel, they were given opportunity to go in and possess the land according to God’s will. After having the opportunity to line themselves with God’s plan, then the time was over. After the time of “discernment” –in the valley of decision–then God set forth the new path, one of 40years (number of judgement) in the wilderness, even until a generation dies off. Even though they then recanted, and tried to go in and possess the land (Num. 14), they were fully throttled by the enemy. Bottom line: you have to take the opportunity when it is available.
At this point, it looks like Elpi has all his ducks in a row (all bishops in lock step) and that no amount of criticism, heckling, or reprimand will change a thing. As for the parishioners who cannot read the handwriting on the wall, they will go with the whole into captivity to LBGT etc. etc, and the GOA will become another trophy of the Globalist cabal like the TEC. What this does, is the Holy Spirit of God is then replaced by the country club atmosphere; without God’s presence fueling the koinonia, then all kinds of social justice things are created to fill the vacuum in people’s hearts. It becomes more about being involved in benevolent activity which always becomes benevolence in some political agenda. Keeping the sheep busy in “just causes”, they are slowly assimilated and more and more into the delusion with their eternal felicity in doubt.
Now would be a good time to get out, do it for your children’s sake.
Other jurisdictions are not much better off. At least, in some sense, the corruption can be isolated at the top when priests stand their ground refusing to comply, creating as safe zone where the delusion of the metropolitan has no effect. Keep this in mind; historically, it was always the schismatics that cut off the true Church. This is how the great schism went down; all severing actions were first initiated by the Roman church and the east merely responded in like kind. In this sense, it is important to notice “who started it” (the severing). The Roman church first cut off eastern rite parishes to start with. For you priests that have stood your ground, you are in the safest place any one can be, and to any degree they are censoring you, consider it a blessing. As we said before, churches are not buildings but people. “My sheep know my voice” and they that hear the Good Shephard will discern which mouthpiece He is using and line themselves with those who can discern good and evil (Hebrews 5).
Remember the COVID hysteria? How many Orthodox Christian leaders (bishops and priests) fell for the COVID “narrative”? Many of them, if not most. The same thing is happening again.I will say, the changes to the Holy Liturgy, at least some of them such as multiple spoons and alcohol and masks appear to have become a permanent part of what is ‘holy’ at least in my OCA Parish. I had plenty of communication with my priest since the beginning of the Covid agenda. He knows what is behind it, but still, he goes along. I warned that they will never permit this crisis to end and will likely follow if need be with WW3 against Russia. They have been preparing the minds of people to accept and support what is about to happen. It is all part of pushing ahead the same one world government agenda. And now our priests are calling for intense prayer for Ukraine. My only question: where were your prayers for 8 years while the western supported and created powers were slaughtering women and children in Donbass? No special prayers for them, their blood is so cheap? One priest responded that he prayed every Sunday. He means in those general prayers ‘God have mercy on all affected by war’. But there were no special prayers as we now have for the Ukraine. What about Syria, Iraq, Libya, and more plus all the countries under economic attack from the same western powers? No special prayers for them, only accusations. I’m into my 5th year since baptism and am now rather jaded as far as the current squad who claim to be the Orthodox Church in the west. It means something when I can agree with almost everything Archbishop Vigano, Cardinal of Rome says but look with suspicion on my own Church. Several leaders in western Orthodoxy but representing groups who are not ethnically anglo gave a statement against something said regarding abortion by Elpidorphorous. Once again silent are all from the OCA.There is a reason God divided the tongues at Babel and split people off into groups. It would prevent a unified effort towards evil. The one world government, new world order is that same effort and likely, in my view, the last effort. Everything has to be wrecked to make it come to pass and welcome antichrist. Our lives in this world are going to be shaken as well it should be.Amen, come Lord Jesus.
A “narrative” that is borne from ~20 million excess deaths worldwide over the course of the pandemic. Deaths that don’t track with the timing of vaccine campaigns, that don’t track with the timing or severity of NPI like lockdowns, but rather that track exactly with the timing and intensity of Covid-19 surges in each country, state, and community where Covid hits.
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https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
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https://dailysceptic.org/2022/03/13/lancet-paper-on-excess-mortality-uses-six-models-and-churns-out-nonsensical-results/
Jonathan,
You cited a study from the “Lancet”.
Funding information of that “study”:
“Funding
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J Stanton, T Gillespie, and J and E Nordstrom”
Re: Bill Gates
https://www.corbettreport.com/who-is-bill-gates-full-documentary-2020/
Jonathan never commented on this fact.
We would say that quoting a paper that is dependent on modeling and not real data gathering completely eviscerates any claim to “scientific” creds that you might have. Particularly if it is funded by a foundation which has monetary and ideological interests in the Pandemic. Why did Africa has such a low toll from COVID? Why was the age and co-morbidity information suppressed in favor of trying to convince young, healthy people that they were at risk? Why was asymptomatic spread suddenly an issue with this virus when never before? Why suppress early treatment of the disease?
We published a treatment protocol for Omicron and Delta after our Webinar:
https://orthodoxreflections.com/webinar-resources/#omicron
These treatments have been known since early 2020. Notice the list includes Ivermectin. It is not a perfect treatment. While Dr. Paisios has not lost a patient, then again neither did Peter McCullough, not all patients will respond. Some very sick, very obese, etc. will die. The discussion was not between perfect treatment and the gene therapies. The discussion was between safe, generally effective treatments and novel, poorly tested, gene therapies that were not needed.
South Korea has an 83% vax rate and has a travel advisory because COVID is supposedly raging. High vax rates were coterminous with continued NPIs. Not that NPIs helped, but it was clear that the powers-that-be did not believe the vaccines reduced spread. Not that spread should have mattered given the fact that most people never even knew they were infected. But spread seemed to matter to PH, so we got highly vaxxed populations running around in masks even as they had to prove their vax status to access public areas.
The mRNA jabs do not reduce spread. Don’t keep you from getting sick. The most they could do is lessen symptoms of a disease that is already minor for the vast majority of people infected. Given the death and ADRs we have from the Pfizer clinical data, what we can get from VAERS (broken as that system is), plus the studies / reports that are coming out, we would estimate that even your adherence to the vaccine narrative won’t last the year. If you are honest with yourself. After all, if you are pushing the 4th dose of a failed pharma product in a year, for a disease with such low lethality – then are you not publicly admitting the thing doesn’t work? And the incidence of ADRs keeps going up with each jab.
The data are against you. Even NYC has seen a severe decline in the jabs. The long term side effects are unknown and will continue to accumulate. We were always on the right side of this. Against hysteria, for proven historical methods of dealing with a virus, and against rushed, experimental treatments. You can’t say the same, but at least you can quit being a cheerleader for human experimentation.
That’s incredibly ironic. You apparently don’t even understand that the study was based on real data gathering of deaths in 2020 and 2021, which is written clearly in the very first sentence under methodology.
If you didn’t understand that basic information, then by your own criteria does that not “eviscerate” your own credibility?
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I can try to walk you through it. The total deaths in the study DO come from real data gathering. But to determine excess deaths from that total number MUST include modeling, otherwise how do you know how many deaths were excess? You could very roughly compare 2020 deaths to 2019 deaths with zero modeling, and if we did that we would see similarly massive #’s of excess deaths. But that isn’t considered the most scientifically accurate way to do it because conditions change year-to-year – a population may be aging or getting younger, a heat wave or famine might strike, a war may break out or end. So each year, in every country, an expected deaths # is calculated based on projections. In this case they’ve improved the expected deaths model based on actual events of the year. Again, how else would you calculate excess deaths?
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But if you hate science so much that you refuse all models (despite modeling being at the basis of the vast majority of science), then lets merely compare 2020 and 2021 deaths to 2019 deaths. Deaths have gone up dramatically. Did they go up where lockdowns occurred? Nope, only where Covid cases surged. Did they go up where vaccinations were highest? Nope, only where Covid cases surged. Did deaths increase highest during lockdowns? Nope, they peaked at the same time as Covid surges peaked with a 2-3 week lag. Did deaths increase highest when people were getting vaccinated? Again, no, when there was vaccination programs but no Covid spread deaths did not change, but where there was Covid surges without vaccination the deaths surged.
In an earlier post I already laid out all that raw data clearly. Posted the excess death data in the USA over the course of the year and showed how it exactly tracked with Covid cases, but not with lockdowns or vaccinations. Posted the excess death data state-by-state, and showed how since fall 2020 deaths have been highest in the states with the least lockdowns and vaccinations, rather than the opposite as you would claim. You claimed you’d get an expert to evaluate, I waited for weeks, and then when that didn’t happen you posted new links with obviously false information that was easily debunked, with things as simple as someone not having a clue that only Relative Risk Reduction and not Absolute Risk Reduction can be used when extrapolating from one study group to another. You simply ignored it, but then come in here and post new and different false claims about the research.
As I said above, it’s very tiring.
From your report:
Jonathan Hill – Do you not know what a statistical model is? Perhaps Nicholas can help, since he designs global financial modeling software. This is an estimate, not actual data. Yes, they got data from selected countries then they clearly created models to estimate excess deaths. Maybe Imperial College Medicine collaborated on it?
Also, catch this bit?
So they’re estimating excess mortality on the basis of models, they get a delta between the reported COVID-19 death toll and their estimate, and they straight up tell that, unlike Jonathan, they are not sure if the virus did it or some other factor. You want to hang your hat on this? Right? At least they are honest, unlike you. There were many factors adding to excess mortality over the past two years. All of which you ignore, and so really, just had enough of the discussion over it.
Models were not an issue until faulty ones were used to drive NPIs and vaccine mandates down our throats. Models can be helpful, but they are only as good as their design and the input.
So let’s put this succinctly then, what you are trying to say.
1) NPIs reduced deaths. Based on state by state comparisons, states with masks, lockdowns, social distancing had fewer deaths than states without those measures.
2) Higher vaccination rates correlate to lower all cause mortality. Based on your posted state by state data.Correct?
3) The death toll from COVID is substantially higher than previously thought, meaning COVID was more deadly that previously accounted for. Correct?
Are those the points you are driving at? Because we asked you before and got nothing. No busy medical professional is going to sit down and go through your threads. We already told you that. But if those are your primary points and we have your data, then we have something to work with.
As for Dr. Williams and the ARR / RRR, at the time he was talking about cases. At the time when he was meeting with Pfizer reps (who wanted him to give the mRNA to his patients), he was told that the mRNA jab would stop infection. The information he was provided as a researcher and practicing physician was in the Pfizer product monograph linked in the article. Which, funnily enough, has been taken down. Notice they were not even discussing preventing death or serious illness. This was about preventing infections.
Now we know that is not true. You admit that. The story switched to preventing death or serious outcomes. Now, what Dr. Williams did, using the numbers Pfizer gave him, was come to the conclusion that everyone else did. The 95% effectiveness at preventing infection was hogwash. It was pure marketing. If you had started the vax program by putting the real numbers in front of people, especially a NNT that high, what would have happened?
So confirm points 1 -3 or restate what you are really after if you want anyone to take time to look at your data. Also, the only vaccines available are still under EUA. The EUA process is being substantially abused, wouldn’t you say?
According to the FDA, “Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”
There are many treatments available to treat COVID, including Pfizer’s and Merck’s. Why are we still administering EUA vaccines when there is an adequate, approved, and available alternative?
You stated that they needed to work from data, not models. Yet they used all the data from countries that report mortality data. Some states stopped collecting mortality data (in many cases because the huge increases in deaths were embarrassing their governments), so those gaps had to be estimated based on the data they did have. How can you insist that they acquire data that literally doesn’t exist? You seem to be straining for a “gotcha” moment instead of even trying to work with reality.
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Would you prefer to focus solely on the USA, where mortality data is complete and where it shows that excess deaths have been astronomical, track exactly with Covid surges week-to-week and state-to-state, do not track with lockdowns, do not track with vaccination campaigns? I already laid out all that raw data for you very explicitly and you ignored it. If excess deaths have so clearly been enormous (over 1 million in the USA) in America and every other country collecting mortality data that has been hit hard by Covid, what plausibility to you have that it’s not high in the hard-hit nations that stopped collecting data?
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And what you claim about vaccinations not preventing infections is simply false. Vaccination enormously reduced infections for the Alpha strand. Vaccination enormously reduced infections for the Delta strand (though not as strongly). And vaccination still reduced infection for the Omicron strand, though not nearly as effectively. So no, the claim that vaccination reduced infections was never a lie. This is again a case of you simply asserting something as true without actually having evidence that it’s true, you just wish to believe it because it supports your narrative.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/02/08/good-news-full-vaccination-protects-against-omicron-hospitalization-and-death/?sh=1bb14df87bb2
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00775-3
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2119451
And as for “Dr. Williams” and ARR versus RRR, there is zero debate to be had. His calculations were hogwash. Please, I beg you, go to any health university and show that to any professor who deals with health statistics. He will laugh you out of the room. I already showed you exactly why it is completely nonsensical to take an ARR, which is meant ONLY to apply to a specific study period with a certain infection rate, and try to apply that to an entirely different population experiencing a completely different infection rate.
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The data showed, “8 vaccinated persons and 160 unvaccinated persons caught Covid during the study. Thus vaccinated individuals were 95% less likely to catch Covid than unvaccinated individuals, but because infection rates were low during the study period, vaccination only prevented ~152 infections out of 20,000 vaccinated people.”
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Any normal person would see that if the infection rate doubled, the # of prevented infections would likely also double. Dr. Williams assumes that even if the infection rate doubles, triples, quadruples, increases by a factor of 10x, that the # of prevented infections always stays exactly the same. That’s simply ignorant, and it is mind-blowing that after being corrected many, many times, he refuses to see such an obvious error. I’ll say again, PLEASE show his work to anyone who has to public similar calculations in their work. It is not a difficult mistake to catch.
The trial reported eight cases of COVID-19 (as defined above) among the immunized group and 162 in the placebo group. So, the risk of COVID-19 in the immunized group was 8/21,720 = 0.037%, and the risk in the unimmunized group was 162/21,728 = 0.745%. The ARR is defined simply as the difference in risk between the two groups. In this case it would be = 0.745% – 0.037% = 0.708%; we will round it to 0.7%. The RRR is the ARR expressed as a percentage of the absolute risk of disease in the unvaccinated. In this case, it is = 0.708/0.745 = 95%. This RRR is what is reported (this is standard practice) as the “efficacy” of the vaccine.
It is the more difficult subjective question of whether our proposed measure is worth it. In the case of a serious disease like Covid19 this is a complex question because whilst we want to save lives, we also recognize that the vaccines, like all medical interventions, are not free from serious side effects. Even though only a small percentage suffer such effects, we must weigh this against the fact that we are also dealing with mostly small percentages of people (depending on personal risk factors) who die from COVID-19. The ARR and RRR are both important parameters that help us in addressing these complex issues
This illustrates why considering the ARR may be helpful. In the Pfizer clinical trial mentioned above, the risk of COVID-19 = 0.75%; so, reducing this risk by 95% does not seem like a very impressive effect. But the issue becomes even more complex to interpret. Within the clinical trial, different subgroups of people have different risks of getting COVID-19. Furthermore, different age groups have vastly differing risks of mortality from COVID-19. We cannot simply assume that a relative risk reduction of 95% applies uniformly across all age ranges from the trial data without further age stratification of the results. In general, younger people have massively lower risks from COVID-19, so the ARR is tiny in those groups. In addition, the risk of getting the disease in different sectors of the population, and in different geographical locations, may also be different.
There is a final important point to consider relative to trial design and reported outcomes. Whilst it is important to determine whether the vaccines are effective at reducing infection, it is equally important to know whether they improve health outcomes overall – is the benefit sufficient to justify the potential risk? For example, in the vaccine trial discussed above, there were 262 serious adverse events noted in the vaccinated group and 172 serious adverse events noted in the placebo group (which admittedly seems odd as one wouldn’t expect a saline injection to produce any adverse events). Given that, for the vast majority, COVID-19 is not a serious illness , adverse events arising during the trials should also factor into our decision about overall suitability of the proposed measure.
The logical conclusion is that the RRR and ARR of an intervention (in this case a vaccine) reported in a RCT should be interpreted carefully when making decisions about the desirability of implementing the intervention in the general population. It is not sound public health practice to say: “This vaccine is 95% effective, so let’s give it to everyone”. The decisions to implement interventions in the population should use results of a RCT as valuable information, but should also take into account many factors such as the actual risk of getting COVID-19 in different populations (geographical locations, different ages, other medical conditions…), the probability of getting sick with COVID-19 during different seasons, and the probability of adverse events following vaccination among others.
https://www.pandata.org/understanding-relative-risk-reduction-and-absolute-risk-reduction-in-vaccine-trials/
Your entire response completely ignores that “Dr. Williams” completely botched the calculations in such a manner that suggests he doesn’t understand ARR or RRR at all. ARR is important to consider in the context of the conditions under which the ARR was measured. But ARR for one trial is completely irrelevant once the outside conditions change. Whereas the RRR should remain constant as long as the virus is the same, the ARR during one week of the pandemic will never be the same as the ARR during a different week unless the caseload was exactly the same, nor can the ARR during one limited time period be equated to the ARR for a time period of a different length.
……
That incredibly obvious error, one that even someone with a basic STEM understanding could figure out with 5 minutes of reading, invalidates the entire conclusion and makes it useless. The fact that “Dr. Williams” still can’t figure that out after numerous people have told him, and the fact that you still direct people to the article, suggests that neither of you can be trusted on this issue in the slightest nor are you open to correction even on obvious errors.
……
As I said, please ask ANYONE who deals with research calculating RRR/ARR to check Dr. Williams’s work on this. It will not take any particular expertise, if they have the basic math knowledge and don’t get lost in word problems then it will be very easy to catch. If you can’t admit your errors here then it really shows a combination of ignorance and arrogance that, sadly, permeates the rest of your claims on this issue as well.
We quoted a completely separate analysis of the Pfizer trial that came to the exact same numbers as Dr. Williams. In fact, every analysis gets the same ARR / RRR. So where is the “botch” in the calculations? We passed along a response one of our other medical contributors sent us about how poorly constructed and rushed the Pfizer trial was. Good points on that, and the fact that you can’t make any good decisions on the basis of it. You should read that one.
Here is what Dr. Williams had to say about you:
Wow. Pretty much sums you up, Jonathan. Again, this article
https://www.pandata.org/understanding-relative-risk-reduction-and-absolute-risk-reduction-in-vaccine-trials/
Comes up with the same numbers and same conclusions as Dr. Williams – the marketing of Pfizer inflated the efficacy. They did not tell the whole story, and what happened in real life was no where near “95%” efficacy as sold originally to the public, PHA, and the medical profession.
One last statement before I pull away from this exercise in futility. Your comment:
You unintentionally exposed here why you have so badly misinterpreted all of the vaccine “adverse event” data. In any population of 20,000+ people studied over any length of time you are going to see random adverse events occur. In the real world, people occasionally get fevers, they occasionally get muscle aches, they occasionally get headaches, and so on. When you blindly assume that all such events are the direct result of the vaccine you’re being ridiculous – those 172 “adverse events” after the saline shot are merely background noise, representing less than 1% of the population who happened to have a bad day sometime in the week or two after their fake saline shot. Some of that is psychosomatic but the vast majority is likely just random events because in the real world headaches, fevers, muscle aches, dizziness, fainting, etc. happen occasionally for all sorts of different reasons.
……
In any one serious case, doctors can examine the person, do tests, and try to work out exactly what caused the event (“see, your blood sugar was just low”, “see, you caught this unrelated virus”, etc.). But in the aggregate with mass events, you have to estimate. If you have 172 adverse events randomly occur in your control group, and 262 adverse events occur in your vaccinated group, then you assume the true # of vaccination-related adverse events is ~90 (with the necessary calculations to determine uncertainty range). In other words, less than 1 in 200, which is slightly steep compared to some vaccines but still within the normal range seen in adult vaccination. Remember, these “serious adverse events” were not life-threatening (that’s Stage 4, another step higher), but were merely times when fevers, chills, fatigue, tenderness at injection site, or muscle pain were ranked highly enough to reach “severe” on the scale. Such grade 3 adverse events are unpleasant but they are also a regular part of life that happens for one reason or another to plenty of people, and in any group of 20,000 folk you’re going to see some of them by default.
……
Why is it so important that you didn’t understand this? Because it lies at the very center of why you misinterpret VAERS data so terribly. You linked me to a guy who assumed that only 1-2% of vaccine deaths were reported to VAERS, a patently ridiculous claim based on ridiculous logic. In reality, the vast majority of VAERS reported deaths are normal background noise – if you give out 563 million shots then some tiny % of those people will happen to randomly die in the next few days, even more in the next few weeks, due to the mere fact that people die. The same thing would happen if you had given out 563 million saline shots. You keep ignoring that the expected background rate of deaths from heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots that normally occurs in that large a group would lead to a death count far higher than that reported in VAERS, so conceivably every reported VAERS death could be background noise. You don’t realize that for the same reason you don’t understand why adverse reactions are reported for control populations getting saline shots.
…..
So how do you tell what is the real vaccine death rate? You should be looking at there things:
#1: How many deaths after vaccination can be definitively attributed to the vaccine by medical personnel treating the victim?
#2: How comfortably can the # of reported deaths after vaccination be explained by the normal expected background death rate in that period?
#3. How do total death numbers in an area fluctuate during major vaccine campaigns? When huge #’s of people are vaccinated at a particular time, does that lead to any corresponding bump in total registered deaths compared to places where vaccination rates are lower or times when fewer daily shots were given?
#4. Is there any positive correlation between more vaccinations and more deaths? When comparing two like areas, does the one with more vaccination have more deaths, or fewer?
.
By all four of those criteria, the shots are proving to be incredibly safe. Very few deaths have been directly attributed to the shots (the rare blood clots after the Johnson & Johnson shot being the exception that proves the rule). The # of reported deaths in the VAERS system is several times lower than the # of expected deaths that 563 million people would randomly expect within any two-week period. The total death counts never went up in line with vaccination #’s, not even when 3 million people were getting vaccinated every day. And the states with the highest excess death counts are invariably the ones with lower vaccination rates, not higher, except in certain cases (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts) where the majority of their excess deaths occurred before vaccination was even available.
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Admitting you don’t know why saline shots lead to adverse event reports is admitting you can’t evaluate the VAERS reports either. The four-part evaluation I just gave, which I have supported in previous comments with extremely detailed tables and graphs showing total deaths state-by-state and time-by-time as well as detailed reports of other nations, all show that vaccination cannot possibly be more deadly than disease. And you just don’t want to see it because you’ve committed to a narrative.
First, that was a direct quote not from anything we have ever published, but from Ivan Iriarte MD and Simon Phoenix PhD writing here:
https://www.pandata.org/understanding-relative-risk-reduction-and-absolute-risk-reduction-in-vaccine-trials/
So what are we unintentionally exposing here? That a pair of researchers not connected to us in anyway finds the ADRs in placebo group to be strange? You might want to argue the point with them.
The Pfizer trial was not done well, and we do know of significant side effects that have been shown to exist. This has to be balanced with the actual risk of COVID across different age and health cohorts. Again, from the paper and not from anything we published:
In a rushed study of something should have taken 6 years of trials and study, there is simply not enough data to ensure safety. There was a decided lack of safety protocols.
You also said:
There was no incentive to try and find ADRs or to report them. In fact, as we have quoted from eyewitness accounts (Nurses and Doctors), the incentive was to ignore them. Nurses that tried to report their own adverse reactions were terminated. In prior Vaccine programs, as few as 50 deaths shut down the whole program.
Are you claiming there are not 50 deaths attributable to the mRNA in the US? How did we get so lackadaisical about human lives?
There are many physicians with whom you are now arguing, just in our comments page. Dr. Paisios gave this list of limitations to safety testing:
https://orthodoxreflections.com/dr-paisios-list-of-noes/
And the numbers are just now starting to come out. The failed Swine Flu vaccines is still under investigation from 2009 and we are still finding adverse reactions surfacing today.
The more data that comes out, the more papers done, the more the extent of this damage will be clear. Again, 50 deaths were all that was needed to shut down a vaccine program before. Even low estimates of vaccine-induced mortality would have stopped these vaccines in their tracks before they ever made it to market. Why did the rules change for a virus that primarily affects the elderly? Why are we injecting it in kids, especially when it produces, at best, short-lived immunity to a disease most kids have had, and if not are unlikely to suffer from?
You also said:
Let’s start with the under reporting to VAERS.
By a Registered Nurse with a background in both clinical and pharmaceutical (research and educator on post-marketed products) settings.
https://orthodoxreflections.com/answering-afr-on-covid-and-the-vaccines-with-fr-john-parker-and-dr-ryan-sampson-nash/
So let’s be clear. VAERS is being underutilized. There is ample evidence of that. The VAERS cases reported are not being investigated. We don’t have a safety board. We aren’t doing the autopsies needed. You have zero idea what is background and what isn’t. Even a fraction of these ADRs would have caused a pause in any previous drug rollout for more testing and investigation. Yet, here we are, continuing to push the shots for a disease that was always treatable, but now is no more than a cold.
You also said:
Great question. Let’s get the answer to this, why don’t we? Especially since we have reports of people actually dying at vaccination centers. Who is doing this research? Pfizer? Tell us – where do we get this info?
Ditto for this. Who is doing this research and where can we access it?
That would catch immediate ADRs, if properly reported. If they aren’t, then you will have incorrect data. That also wouldn’t include longer-term ADRs such as cognitive effects, heart effects that manifest later, loss of pregnancy, fertility effects, etc. You see, Jonathan, clinical trials are normally multi-year events to catch not only short term but also longer term impacts to health. And even then, the FDA failure rate is astounding. 21% of FDA approved medications ultimately had to be removed from the market or be given a black box warning. Essentially, if you’re taking a newly approved drug, the chances that this drug will be found to be extremely dangerous is 1 in 5. Only one in ten new drugs provide substantial benefit compared to existing, established drugs. The malfeasance of the FDA has been so bad that prescription drugs are the 4th leading cause of death. American patients also suffer from about 80 million mild side effects a year, such as aches and pains, digestive discomforts, sleepiness or mild dizziness.
Great topic. Who is doing comprehensive research on that?
You don’t have any firm data from any of those criteria, unless you can find responsible 3rd party researchers who have anything to share. As for excess deaths, you just said except in certain cases such as New York, New Jersey, and Mass. Why are those cases different? What is special in those three states that they don’t fit your pattern?
Death is not the only ADR, nor are short term affects the only thing of concern. As per typical Jonathan, you have no data but you are telling us to all be totally sure. The CDC / FDA are now pushing a 4th booster. If there is any risk at all, then what is the benefit for low-COVID risk cohorts getting a jab that produces only short-term immunity? Cost benefit analysis is a real thing.
You also said:
So did the fact that the quote on saline shots came from an article not published on our site by two researchers with whom we have no relationship (other than quoting them in comments) finally sink in? Or do we need to repeat it?
Quick summary. VAERS undercounts ADRs, which include death but many others as well. We have a huge problem in that we don’t have reliable data. The jabs were formulated for a strain of the disease that no longer exists, but they are still being pushed even though they have negative efficacy. More people died after jabs were available than before. Why? We don’t know. Delta and Omicron were just as treatable.
In fact, COVID has always been treatable. The first treatment protocol came out in March 2020. It was ignored, because if you had a treatment protocol, then you couldn’t get an EUA for the vaccines.
Here’s a treatment protocol for Delta and Omicron:
https://orthodoxreflections.com/webinar-resources/#omicron
So the narrative we are committed to? The FDA and CDC are corrupted by money. The term is agency “capture.” Substantial corners were cut, and we are flying blind while still trying to inject millions when the benefit is perhaps, at best, a few months of increase immunity to a not particularly deadly disease and we don’t have a clue of the possible total short term and long term side effects.
Jonathan,
You write:
‘The data showed, “8 vaccinated persons and 160 unvaccinated persons caught Covid during the study.’
How do you know? Have you seen Pfizer’s raw data (no one has so far — you would be the first)?
What CT cutoffs were used?
Were both vaccinated and unvaccinated screened for COVID to the same extent?
How/to what extent was differential diagnosis conducted for those 8/160 who were “diagnosed” with COVID?
Questions, no answer yet.
Too busy? If you were more concise with your comments, you could find spare time to answer those questions.
Jonathan,
What are — as of April 2022 — the current numbers of people in the original “vaccinated” group and the original unvaccinated group who have shown so far the symptoms which were the endpoint of Pfizer’s original study? What are those current numbers? Could you please check that — then we will know much better how much the relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction in fact diverge over a longer period of time. As Pfizer’s shots are paid with taxpayer’s money, Pfizer will surely have a dashboard on their website showing the daily statistics of the complete population involved in the original “study” (and they surely would not mess up that study by unblinding the placebo group, would they?)? So could you please check those numbers and report them to us?
Thank you very much!
Still curious.
Could please provide those data?
Thank you in advance!
Jonathan,
Still no answer.
Difficulties finding those numbers?
Why don’t you answer?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymT-s2SP9GA
Contributed by one of medical contributors via email:
Dr.Robert Williams up front referenced this paper here on Reporting Bias: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996517/
Jonathan might want to chew on this article for a while. In addition, we all know the Pfizer study was not conducted as well as it could have been because it was rushed and the end points are now questionable. The sample sizes of some of the sub-populations were insufficient, the follow up was not long enough, they looked at cases instead of hospitalizations or deaths as outcomes etc. etc., which you already mentioned in your remarks. The ARR or RRR debate is really an argument of statistical application rather than vaccine efficacy, because if the efficacy of concern is to avoid hospitalization or death, the Pfizer study did not even include those as endpoints which renders the ARR and RRR for infection, rather moot. So in the end, the whole study was real world meaningless, wouldn’t you say? It was just impressive enough for a short while, thanks to their marketing, to make it a means to a gold mine for Pfizer. That’s not to say that only the very elderly with one foot already in the grave should not do a fourth booster (seeing as the protection falls off after 12-24 weeks post vaccination according to some sources, AND, if the poor souls do get harmful side effects, they were on their way out anyway) or others who are younger but suffering from comorbidities and want the vaccine. But in my view, the newer Novavax might be better than mRNA since it has been developed using similar technology to Hep B vaccines – which last decades! If I were to gamble on a vaccine (because frankly none of them have had long term studies and all of them are dices of one sort or another) I’d probably go with that one. Bottom line – we saw some dumb science in the Pfizer product monograph.
You keep deflecting over and over and over to avoid the fact that Dr. Williams completely miscalculated and was absolutely wrong in his use of ARR. He made embarrassing, amateur errors which show he did not understand the concept at all. And yet you’re still linking to his essay as if it shows something. (Just like you link the paper claiming that vaccines kill at a higher rater than Covid even though it makes the most ridiculous, obviously false claims.)
……
Please, show ANY academic in the field how Dr. Williams used ARR to make his claims of how many cases would have been prevented nationally. And then when they tell you how wrong it is, consider why you’ve trusted him for months. I’m not going to continue to chase you through every new goalpost shift when all the ones you’ve offered so far have been incredibly wrong, easy to disprove, and yet it changes nothing for you.
Obviously, you missed the fact that the comment you are replying to was not Dr. Williams’ article. It was quoting a piece done by Ivan Iriarte MD and Simon Phoenix PhD and published at this link:
https://www.pandata.org/understanding-relative-risk-reduction-and-absolute-risk-reduction-in-vaccine-trials/
Not only did those two doctors get the same numbers as Dr. Williams in terms of RRR and ARR, but they also cautioned that the 95% efficacy was being sorely abused by marketing. They got the same numbers as Dr. Williams:
That is one example, we found multiple others. So it seems that Dr. Williams’ math is not off. Come to think of it, you were never able to show us how the math was wrong to begin with. Now, let’s talk about ARR and its usefulness, according to those two doctors. We quoted that above, but you seem to have not seen the link and simply assumed we were quote Dr. Williams again. Which we weren’t. So here is their ARR take:
So you’ve been saying Dr. Williams can’t do math, and doesn’t understand ARR / RRR, despite being a medical researcher. But here are two other doctors giving the same numbers and the same cautions as to efficacy. If you would like to disprove now THREE medical researchers, then you are going to have to shut up and actually show how all THREE of these doctors got these calculations wrong. What is the ARR supposed to be? How is it supposed to be calculated given the numbers above? Otherwise, this topic should be closed.
Jonathan,
Still no answer from you to those questions posted more than a week ago:
‘
You write:
‘The data showed, “8 vaccinated persons and 160 unvaccinated persons caught Covid during the study.’
How do you know? Have you seen Pfizer’s raw data (no one has so far — you would be the first)?
What CT cutoffs were used?
Were both vaccinated and unvaccinated screened for COVID to the same extent?
How/to what extent was differential diagnosis conducted for those 8/160 who were “diagnosed” with COVID?’
Also no answer yet to those questions:
‘What are — as of April 2022 — the current numbers of people in the original “vaccinated” group and the original unvaccinated group who have shown so far the symptoms which were the endpoint of Pfizer’s original study? What are those current numbers? Could you please check that — then we will know much better how much the relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction in fact diverge over a longer period of time. As Pfizer’s shots are paid with taxpayer’s money, Pfizer will surely have a dashboard on their website showing the daily statistics of the complete population involved in the original “study” (and they surely would not mess up that study by unblinding the placebo group, would they?)? So could you please check those numbers and report them to us?’
Jonathan, are you having difficulties finding the information?
Pfizer surely would not withhold that information from the public, would they — after all the public pays.
Governments would surely insist on Pfizer making that data immediately and completely accessible to each and anyone (which is not problem at all in the age of the internet), wouldn’t they — after all, the shots are paid by taxpayers.
Why don’t you answer? Busy?
Stanisław Jerzy Lec:
The view of the world can be blocked with a newspaper.
Mark Twain:
A little learning makes the whole world kin.
We may have driven Jonathan away. So alas, you may never get an answer to your request for data. Not from Jonathan, and not from Pfizer either.
And South Korea was a terrible country to choose if you wanted to try to prove that “vaccines don’t work”. South Korea’s covid death rates are 10x lower than the USA. Not 10% lower, not twice as low, but TEN TIMES LOWER than us. 300 deaths/million as opposed to 3000 deaths/million. Hmmmm…..might that be because we have far more unvaccinated persons and the vast majority of deaths are among the unvaccinated?
……
Yes, they had high vaccination rates. Until Omicron, that kept their case rates extremely low. Funny that I don’t see you arguing “vaccines worked great until Omicron hit”, you claim vaccines didn’t work from the beginning. Yet by the exact data you’re using to show Covid spread in South Korea during Omicron, you’d have to admit that there was very little Covid spread after vaccination during Alpha and Delta. Why are you ignoring every piece of data that blows your narrative apart?
………
The scientific community is well aware that Omicron often evades vaccines. Unfortunately it evades AstraZeneca and Pfizer at a much higher rate than Moderna, and most South Koreans got AstraZeneca or Pfizer. Unfortunately it is especially successful at evading those vaccines over 6 months after the shot, and most South Koreans got their shot early. And unfortunately South Korea is 15x more densely populated than the USA as well as being in a temperate climate well-suited to Covid. So them having a large surge late in the Omicron surge was entirely predictable.
……
But you know what else was predictable? That despite the surge in cases, South Korea would continue to have very few deaths….because…..wait for it….they’re VACCINATED. Literally 10x fewer deaths than the USA despite the same total case rates. Their huge population density, their temperate climate, their lack of high levels of Moderna, all of that worked against them….but the vaccines still kept people alive. Here’s just one quote:
……
“The mortality rate is close to zero among those 60 and under who have completed the third vaccination,” Park Hyang, the health ministry’s anti-epidemic prevention and response management department director general, said at a briefing this week.
Most of the deaths have been among the small group of elderly who haven’t been vaccinated. Those 60 years and older who weren’t inoculated are ten times more likely to die than those who have had boosters, she said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-17/how-south-korea-is-beating-covid-despite-600-000-new-cases-a-day
……
That’s the benefit I have from working from the science rather than working from my own narratives. The actual data from South Korea destroys your claims that vaccines don’t work. They’re having 10x fewer deaths than USA despite all the other factors working against them, and those deaths are concentrated in the unvaccinated. How can you keep cherry-picking a tiny fact that you think helps your case while ignoring that all the context proves you wrong, every time?
Jonathan,
You write:
‘ And South Korea was a terrible country to choose if you wanted to try to prove that “vaccines don’t work”. South Korea’s covid death rates are 10x lower than the USA. Not 10% lower, not twice as low, but TEN TIMES LOWER than us. 300 deaths/million as opposed to 3000 deaths/million. Hmmmm…..might that be because we have far more unvaccinated persons and the vast majority of deaths are among the unvaccinated?’
And:
‘ But you know what else was predictable? That despite the surge in cases, South Korea would continue to have very few deaths….because…..wait for it….they’re VACCINATED. Literally 10x fewer deaths than the USA despite the same total case rates. Their huge population density, their temperate climate, their lack of high levels of Moderna, all of that worked against them….but the vaccines still kept people alive.’
Smart observations!
Still smarter are the vaccines themselves:
Here you find COVID deaths
(whatever that might signify … https://www.hartgroup.org/what-is-a-covid-death/ )
in 2020;
South Korea:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
USA:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Apparently, the high vaccination uptake in South Korea in 2021 caused South Korea to have to deal with far fewer COVID deaths compared to the USA already in 2020 — before the vaccinations were rolled out.
Below the charts with total deaths one find charts with daily new deaths. Interesting, too.
Also of interest:
Total COVID deaths South Korea : USA, Dec. 31, 2020:
900 : 370,800
Total COVID deaths South Korea : USA, March 29, 2022:
15,423 : 1,005,056
Safe and effective!
Thanks Manfred. We did notice after taking a cursory glance at the data Jonathan referenced, that he was aggregating two years together for a total as in “all pandemic.” Now this is interesting. There were no vaccines in 2020. The vaccines were available in 2021. So a good comparison (if the data is real and not modeled) would be to look at March to December 2020 and March to December 2021. We’d have to check the numbers, but we think vaccination got really rolling around the March timeframe. Seasonality should be the same.
Now, what would a vaccine supporter say if there was more excess mortality after vax rollout (as you show above) than prior to the vax rollout? I wonder if that is the way things are across the board? Seems that if excess deaths are higher after 1/3 or better of any given pop group is vaccinated (which it appears they are), then what would explain that besides vaccine failure? How did Covid-19 get more deadly with more people supposedly protected?
It would seem that comparing the two years against each other for the same population group would be better than trying to compare across states.
Notice you try to rely on speculation or wild generalization, rather than facts. Here are South Korea’s Covid cases and deaths:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
…….
Here are South Korea’s excess deaths:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
…….
Here are South Korea’s vaccinations:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=KOR
…….
Note that in 2020, cases peaked in South Korea three times – in March, in August, and in December. All three times there was a corresponding peak in excess deaths – though those peaks were very low. Overall the total population death rate in South Korea increased 1.5% from 2019 to 2020, only slightly above the normal background rate in increase due to their aging population. Compare that to the USA, racked by Covid, where the death rate increased 18% that same year.
……
In 2021 Koreans began getting vaccinated, but slowly, in part due to the lack of perceived need because they had kept infections down. There was a small campaign in April, and a larger campaign in May/June as availability increased and Delta became more of a looming threat. So what happened to excess deaths? They actually went NEGATIVE. From January 2021 through June 2021, the excess death #’s were close to zero or negative at all times. Even though cases did increase as schools began opening in April and mass events like baseball games brought attendance again, the increase in Covid cases and deaths was still so low that excess deaths did not reach their August 2020 peak at any point in the first 6 months of 2021.
…….
In July 2021 the Delta variant began taking over in Korea, leading to increased case #’s. Contact tracing was still strong, but Delta was much more infectious than Alpha, and so they couldn’t hold the line quite so well. On July 24 the excess death rate returned to its August 2020 peak for the first time….and then dropped again. In August and September there was a giant surge in vaccinations to the point that nearly 80% of the population got vaccinated, yet deaths did not surge. Throughout August and September the excess death rate was never higher than it was in July, and there had been a total lull in vaccinations during July. At no point from July 2021 through October 2021 did the excess death rate even hit 1%.
……..
Unfortunately at winter hit there was a second Delta surge, and on December 1 the first Omicron cases hit as well. Excess deaths surged to 1.9%, their highest point of the pandemic. But still only 1.9%!!! Let me compare that to some other places.
……
In April 2020, when New York was first hit, excess deaths peaked at 48.8%.
……
In November 2020, despite being almost entirely rural with few population concentrations, excess deaths in South Dakota peaked at 21.1%
…….
In September 2021, half-vaccinated but refusing to lock down for Delta, excess deaths in Florida peaked at 15.9%.
…..
In January 2022, “we’ll do everything wrong” Mississippi, one of the least-vaccinated and least-NPI’d states in the county, had their 4th large excess death peak in the midst of Omicron, reaching 12% excess death rate.
…..
And yet at no point in 2020 or 2021 did South Korea ever reach even 2% excess death rate, despite having a vaccination rate higher than any of those places. The Economist data only goes through the end of January 2022, so South Korea may have had a little higher peak when Omicron did its worse in February/March 2022, but certainly nowhere near what those less-vaccinated places have experienced.
……
How long will you privilege ideology over reality?
South Korea had few deaths in 2020 because they did an excellent job of keeping their case rate low. Unlike the USA, whose initial response to the disease was to stick its head in the sand, South Korea implemented an extremely strong contract tracing program with mandatory quarantine from the very beginning, due in part to the lessons learned from previous respiratory epidemics. As a result by December 2020 they had only 60,000 cases total and only 900 deaths – a pre-vaccine death rate of 1.5%, quite similar to the USA.
……
Note also that this data point kills another false narrative. Somehow, the massive vaccination program you’re lauding in Korea in early 2021 did not lead to massive deaths or cases. As of July 2021, South Korea actually had negative excess deaths. If these vaccines kill people, why did they kill NOBODY in South Korea? Funny how when you keep Covid cases down, excess deaths disappear. You can’t explain that one, and you can’t admit you were wrong about vaccines killing people. They killed so few people in South Korea that it literally didn’t show in the excess deaths at all despite them having more vaccinations than anyone else.
……
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
……
Now, South Korea continued their strong performance with contact tracing, and thus by August 2021 they were still only up to 200,000 cases, and despite the more deadly Delta variant, their death rate had fallen to 1% – likely in part due to pervasive vaccination. But as I already pointed out cases exploded with Omicron, which both overwhelmed South Korea’s contact tracing efforts and to a degree evaded vaccination when it comes to infection. As of April 1 there has been over 13 million cases, a gargantuan increase. Yet there have only been 16,500 deaths. That death rate, once 1.5% before vaccination, is now down to 0.12% even counting the unvaccinated deaths. In fact, if we only look at the main Omicron surge after February 1, there have been 12.5 million cases in 2 months but just 9,800 deaths – a mortality rate of 0.08%.
……
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
……
That’s the difference that vaccination makes. It’s also the difference an honest debater makes. Randomly throwing out out-of-context figures that you think will support your argument is going to fail you every time, because the vaccines really do work, so the second the context is added it’s going to make that obvious, every time.
…….
Can you explain why excess deaths remained nonexistent in South Korea even as their entire population was getting the shot multiple times? Can you explain why the morality rate there is so low? Can you explain why South Koreans report that their mortality among under-60 vaccinated is virtually nonexistent and their mortality among over-60 unvaccinated is 10x higher than that of over-60 vaccinated?
Note that’s been up for a week and no response. Manfred made ridiculous claims based on the vaguest generalizations and assumptions. I broke down the exact same data week by week and showed how wrong he was. Yet no one here can even acknowledge that? Is it that you still don’t understand it, or that you just refuse to admit when you’re wrong?
You got a response from Manfred. No one who contributes here or reads this blog works for you, Jonathan. We publish your comments because we have a policy against censorship. We do not have a policy that says we have to respond to every comment.
Jonathan,
You write:
“ Now, South Korea continued their strong performance with contact tracing, and thus by August 2021 they were still only up to 200,000 cases, and despite the more deadly Delta variant, their death rate had fallen to 1% – likely in part due to pervasive vaccination. But as I already pointed out cases exploded with Omicron, which both overwhelmed South Korea’s contact tracing efforts and to a degree evaded vaccination when it comes to infection. As of April 1 there has been over 13 million cases, a gargantuan increase. Yet there have only been 16,500 deaths. That death rate, once 1.5% before vaccination, is now down to 0.12% even counting the unvaccinated deaths. In fact, if we only look at the main Omicron surge after February 1, there have been 12.5 million cases in 2 months but just 9,800 deaths – a mortality rate of 0.08%.”
… Lots of numbers you throw around;
just for clarification:
How are “cases” defined in South Korea? What CT threshold is used for PCR in South Korea?
Is the PCR threshold consistent over time, and between laboratories?
What sequences are targeted with PCR?
Is that consistent between laboratories?
Who is tested, how often, and why?
Has that been consistent throughout the last two years?
What is the definition of a COVID death in South Korea?
Have seroprevalence studies systematically and consistently been conducted from spring 2020 up to today?
Is differential diagnosis systematically and consistently conducted — and documented — for “COVID cases” and “COVID deaths”?
What is the definition of a “vaccinated” person and an “unvaccinated” person in South Korea?
As mentioned above:
Lots of numbers you throw around … back at university, one of the introductory books for statistics started in Chapter 1 like this:
If a person had expenses of 1,000 DM, but wants to cheat on her tax return, that person will not want to write expenses of 10,000.00 DM on her tax return form (which would look suspicious); she will rather want to enter expenses of, for instance, 11,340.20 DM on her tax return form — which will probably be more easily accepted.
The lesson being: Be always be alert when people throw around very exact numbers, or lots of numbers, because with some probability, that will, whether intentionally or not, create a pretense of exactness which does not have much foundation, if any, in the real world.
You know so much, so you are probably well aware of the following; for those who read this comment who are not as well versed in statistics in general, and COVID statistics in particular, as you are, and what to make of those statistics, this text might be interesting (especially the chart showing “Things we are not told”):
http://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2020/12/on-false-positives-in-covid19-testing.html
Also this presentation (already one year old, though, and in German with English subtitles):
https://odysee.com/@Corona-Ausschuss:3/CA-40—Wodarg:f
You also write:
“Can you explain why the morality rate there is so low?”
… maybe because people in South Korea live on a less opulent diet than, e. g., some of the people on these photos apparently routinely do?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/assemblyofbishops/albums/72157719962140956
You also write:
“Can you explain why South Koreans report that their mortality among under-60 vaccinated is virtually nonexistent and their mortality among over-60 unvaccinated is 10x higher than that of over-60 vaccinated?”
… maybe because the “vaccinated” are counted as “unvaccinated” as long as they are not beyond two weeks after the latest shot?
Ugh, in that first sentence in “findings” it should say “totalled 5.94 million”, not 594 million. That was my transcription error.
If it is any consolation, most Roman Catholics dismiss Vigano as a “conspiracy theorist.” On the other hand, we are an Orthodox site and we quote him along with Metropolitan Neophytos, Abbot Tryphon, Metropolitan Jonah, etc. Not because Vigano is right on everything, but Good Lord is he right on a lot of things. There is a reason Christ said, “He who has ears…”
Nicholas to bishops & priests: “After COVID, many of you have precious little credibility left. Keep this up, you will have none.” Ouch! …but ain’t it the truth?
A Prayer Campaign for Peace Between Russia and Ukraine
“We pray that true peace will come to those in need. We pray for the avoidance of any war in which humans kill one another, for this is a betrayal of our common humanity, created in the image of God, who is Love itself. For Christians to kill Christians is a still deeper betrayal of all that we believe in. We ask and beg the Church and all Christians to join us in our prayers for peace.”
https://incommunion.org/2022/02/14/a-prayer-campaign-for-peace-between-russia-and-ukraine/