Putin threatens Europe with bioweapons. Can he be stopped?

Putin

Putin

By Umair Haque

Today,(Friday) something remarkable happened. Even in the context of this war. Something chilling. Russia called a meeting of the UN Security Council — on the obviously false pretext that there had been Western bioweapons labs in Ukraine. And then things got even eerier.

Its Ambassador to the UN began to speak in sinister and ominous terms. He said: “We call upon you to think about a very real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine. And if there is a such a scenario then all Europe will be covered.

“The risk of this is very real given the interests of the radical nationalist groups in Ukraine are showing towards the work with dangerous pathogens conducted together with the ministry of defence of the United States.”

See what just happened there? Russia just threatened Europe with bioweapons. All of it.

It was a veiled threat, yes. But it was a threat nonetheless. The kind of clumsy veiled threat that mafias make. “Nice house. It’d sure be a shame if something happened to it.” “Gee, I don’t know. I heard fire burns down shops that don’t pay up.” “It’d be a shame if these bioweapons spilled and hit you. How terrible that’d be.”

So let’s summarize. Russia used the UN Security Council to issue a veiled threat of bioweapons against all of Europe. Bioweapons are weapons of mass destruction. They are the most extreme weapons of mass destruction — regarded as even more forbidden and destructive than nuclear weapons.

These threats are made in what you should by now understand is the Russian style — the gaslighting style. This is your fault. You did this. It’d be a shame if something happened to you. In this case, the purported bioweapons labs were Western ones, American ones. The pretext and justification has been created therefore, to use them. A false flag has been raised. These are your weapons, not ours. Who can say which way birds and bats will fly? Which direction a virus speeds away in?

What a shame! Not our fault. We didn’t do this. You did.

Pause and take that in. Because this is not what economists call “cheap talk.” When Russia issues these threats, it usually means it’s prepared to follow through. Think of how it invaded Ukraine — to the shock of many Ukrainians. When Russia creates these pretexts, they are a signal that an attack is coming. The pretext itself is costly to create. In the case of the invasion, the pretext was that Ukraine was overrun with neo-Nazis, and needed to be pacified and liberated. That pretext then had to be sold to Russians and to China, among others. In this case, the pretext has been costly, too. Russia had to convene a UN Security Council meeting to issue the threat. Russia doesn’t often create justifications and pretexts unless it plans to act on them. Again, think of recent history. Ukraine was neo-Nazi. The pregnant woman was a crisis actor. The maternity hospital had never been used. The lies justify the attacks.

The threat to Europe is very, very real. Putin just threatened it with weapons of mass destruction.

Let’s put all this in context. What’s really happening here? Putin seems to still be escalating. In fact, he is now escalating in dramatic fashion. By the hour and day. Putin may be desperate — but he’s not backing down, he’s doubling down.

Let’s count the escalations, how many doubling downs there have been. First, the invasion. Then, the bombing of civilians in humanitarian corridors. Then the bombing of civilian targets, like maternity hospitals — an odious and obvious war crime. And now he’s threatening Europe with weapons of mass destruction.

That is a major, major escalation. It is about as severe an escalation as you can get, precisely because it reaches into the heights of the most forbidden weapons humanity has — chemical and biological weapons.
The question then is this: why is Putin escalating? The story one camp in the West is telling goes like this: Putin is desperate, and he has “no choice.” But is that really true? Using forbidden weapons of mass destruction is a choice. It’s just a nightmarish one.

This is a moment which requires clarity of thinking. These are simple logical relationships. Escalation is a clear sign that deterrence, by definition, has not worked. Putin is escalating because he is not deterred. Therefore our approach of deterrence is not stopping him. He is escalating, and escalation is the opposite of deterrence.

Putin appears to be willing to go to the edge and beyond. Of serious and horrific war. Nuclear war, biological war, chemical war. War of mass destruction. Places in Ukraine are already at the point of mass destruction — Mariupol, where people have no water or heat, for example.

Putin appears to be willing to go to the edge and beyond. Of serious and horrific war. Nuclear war, biological war, chemical war. War of mass destruction. Places in Ukraine are already at the point of mass destruction — Mariupol, where people have no water or heat, for example.

Now. Why is Putin not deterred?

Our reigning narrative in the West when it comes to this war so far is not quite right. I’m sorry to have to say it. But we have to face the facts if we have any hope of preventing all-out destruction. So, again, these are facts. They are not my opinion.

Putin’s support in Russia has increased recently. More people in Russia back his war now than they did a week ago. In other words, he is enjoying a groundswell of support — even if Western media only covers the protestors and the crackdowns, the social reality is different.

Making things worse, China is taking his side openly now. Read Chinese state media. They openly now support Russia’s false flag of Western biolabs — that too is an escalation, the first time that China has openly supported one of Putin’s Big Lies. They are openly calling this a war of Western aggression. Chinese state media matter, because they are effectively a window into what China’s upper echelons of its ruling party think. They are how those upper echelons control discourse and thinking in China. So those upper echelons are openly taking Russia’s side now.

Again, this is different from the way Western media portrays it — but the truth is that while Western media is doing a great job of covering the war, they are not doing a very good one of analysing it. Let me put that to you another way.

Whose side is China on? It should be obvious — even though if I ask you, many of you will reply with “Ours!” Wrong. Guess who’s still buying copious amounts of Russian oil, gas, coal, nickel, iron, steel, wheat, grains? China is. It isn’t going to take our side. That’s because it already hasn’t. It is already on Russia’s side. If China was going to sanction Russia, it would have already happened by now. That it hasn’t happened — we’re now two weeks into this war— while China is now openly supporting Russia politically, culturally, financially, and economically tells us something. China is not on our side. China is no longer even on the fence — it’s repeating Russian propaganda on its national media. This isn’t my opinion, this is fact. Westerners need to understand this clearly and see the implication.

Put those two facts together. Putin’s support is growing internally — and his allies are choosing his side. What does all that tell you?

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The West’s strategy has been to hope for the opposite. That internal dissension would weaken Putin and bring him down. Large scale social unrest would be sowed by sanctions, and Putin’s own elites would turn on him as they lost their money and access to Western goods. None of this has happened. Precisely the opposite has. Putin is seeing a groundswell of nationalistic support. His elites are powerless to stop him, as good analysts of Russia have pointed out from the beginning, because Putin controls them, they don’t control him, since he can allocate Russia’s state owned enterprises however he likes, not to mention throw them in jail.

The West was also hoping that Putin’s allies would distance themselves from him — notably China. That is because China is Russia’s largest purchaser of electricity, oil, coal, gas, and so forth, most or all its resources, after the EU. But don’t fall for the spin — while Xi and his upper echelons might say the situation’s “disconcerting” or “regrettable,” that’s what they say to us, in the West. To China’s own masses, they are backing Russia’s disinformation, that the war is one of Western aggression, even to the point of repeating the bizarre lies about biolabs. And they are still going right on and purchasing Russian resources like nothing whatsoever has changed. They have no plan and no interest in cutting how much they buy from Russia.

And that is very, very significant. Because though we might have sanctioned Russia, the simple fact is that Putin has plenty of money coming in from China, not to mention the rest of the world, from Africa to Asia, to keep his war machine humming.

That is why Putin is not deterred. He may be desperate, in some vague sense. But not in a real one. In the sense that he’s running out resources, like tanks, guns, bombs, missiles, soldiers, money to buy them with, exports to finance the money with. He is not desperate even in the sociocultural sense, embattled, trying to sell a war that the people don’t back.

Our strategy is not working. In the West it is easy to think that forcing the Moscow Stock Exchange to close and Chanel and McDonald’s pulling out of Russia is a big deal. That isn’t quite true. Do you know how long most countries have had stock markets at all? Maybe twenty or thirty years. Access to Western goods? Most countries in the world still don’t have Chanel boutiques and so on. McDonald’s only went global maybe twenty years ago.

Do you see my point a little? We think to ourselves, a little too glibly, “We’ve got them over a barrel! Life can’t go on without stock markets and McDonald’s and Chanel!” But most of humanity has never had those things — and still doesn’t. And yet life goes on. Countries can function without these things, and most do.

Let me make that message even sharper. Do you know when the Moscow Exchange — the one that Westerners now think proudly is shut down, so it’s a major win — was founded? In 2011. Russia got on without it. Maybe you begin to see my point.

It’s a harsh one, and it’s going to make many people uncomfortable. I’m sorry about that. But it has to be said. Our strategy is not working. Sanctions are not going to stop Putin’s war machine. Countries can exist without the things we’ve yanked away from Russia, or forced to close, from stock markets to fast fashion to luxury brands — and most do. That doesn’t prevent them from making war or conducting genocide one bit.

Our strategy is not even working on the level of shrinking Russian support for Putin’s war to any significant degree. He’s enjoying more support over time, because, of course, that’s what wars do. And as we force unemployment on Russians, what’s going to happen? Hey, you poor desperate broke guy — why don’t you join my army, huh?

Our strategy is not working. It’s not even going to work. Because, as I’ve pointed out to you, Russia is earning more than enough from China to Africa to Asia to keep the war machine going.

It’s true that over time our strategy might weaken Putin. But time is something we don’t have. Russia is openly threatening to use weapons of mass destruction on all of Europe at the UN Security Council today. It has created a justification and pretext for their use, which means an attack is coming soon, whether its chemical weapons used to clear Kyiv, or something even more horrific, like refugees infected with bioweapons to deliberately create havoc in Poland, within NATO’s borders. And since Russia has already disowned using them, it can shrug and say, “Sorry, NATO. What a shame! What a disaster. Too bad — those were your bioweapons.”

You see how serious a situation we are in now.

This is the situation. We have a nation armed with weapons of mass destruction, led by a dictator who wants to create a neofascist empire that stretches into the heart of Europe. He is openly threatening to use those weapons, and he’s used them before, in Syria, which is a good guide to what’s unfolding in Ukraine. Ukraine’s brave President has already warned that Putin will “march to the gates of Berlin” if he’s allowed to.

Putin’s escalating because our strategy is not working. Our strategy is made by Western technocrats who have used such economic warfare on poor countries — Venezuela, Iran, most of South America, much of Africa. If you don’t do what we want, we cut you off from our global economy. You don’t get access to funds, goods, money, finance, credit, stuff.
It works on poor countries because they’re poor. They have no choice. They meekly submit, usually, because the alternative is literally starving to death.

But Russia is not such a country. It will grow poorer, correct. But it will stay relatively healthy by selling its abundant natural resources to a world from China to Africa to Asia. And that world has no special sympathy for us in the West. It isn’t going to join us in sanctioning Russia because we’ve abused that world, too. It needs Russia’s resources desperately precisely because we’re the ones who’ve stopped it from developing by exploiting it basically the level of slave labour, paying it as little as possible for its labour and goods, for so long. We played ourselves.

Russia is not a poor and powerless country. Our strategy of sanctions and economic warfare was designed to bring poor countries low. But they were already on their knees. Making them crawl wasn’t hard. Russia isn’t like that. It’s not going to be significantly weakened by our approach — at least not enough to stop making war. It is a relatively well off country with abundant resources which the world is only too happy to buy. Believe me when I tell you the rest of the world would rather eat Russian grain and have a full belly than lift a finger to be friends with the West that openly holds it in contempt and starve.
We are in a difficult place now.

Putin isn’t reaching breaking point because there isn’t one for him. Russia wants a global confrontation, a world war, a neofascist empire — and its escalating to the point of openly threatening weapons of mass destruction on the free world

Putin is openly threatening to use weapons of mass destruction on Europe, while the world watches, horrified. Our strategy is increasingly in disarray — we increase sanctions everyday, and hope for the breaking point, but it never comes, precisely because there isn’t one. Russia isn’t a poor, powerless nation. We are dealing with it the wrong way.

So what should we do? There is going to be a confrontation, my friends. That’s not what any of us want. Putin’s “brain,” Dugin, has already said so, eagerly awaiting it — he openly talks now about a “global confrontation.” That means a world war.

You don’t threaten Europe with weapons of mass destruction for nothing. Plan a careful campaign of destabilisation from Trump to Brexit for nothing. Putin is confident for a reason. He knows he can make war for a very, very long time to come. He thinks of us as weak and degenerate and easily corrupted, because we accepted his gifts of blood money and oligarchy without a second thought. And now we are making another mistake. We are not making him stand down. That is the only way out of this mess.

Putin isn’t reaching breaking point because there isn’t one for him. Russia wants a global confrontation, a world war, a neofascist empire — and its escalating to the point of openly threatening weapons of mass destruction on the free world.

Euphoria’s a disorienting thing. We had better wake up from the euphoria of the last few weeks — the sudden rush of unity — now. Our situations looks like this. Putin isn’t backing down. China’s on his side. The world isn’t on ours. He’s confident because he is still in a very, very strong position. Financially, economically, socially, culturally, politically.

And so we are going to have to do much better, fast, if we want to stop him.

*Umair Haque is the Director of the London-based Havas Media Lab and heads Bubblegeneration, a strategy lab that helps discover strategic innovation.

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