Russian propaganda links anti-vaccination with Ukraine

Strangely enough, Canadians opposed to COVID vaccines typically support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

image Mother Jones

What is the connection? None that I can see. One is a medical issue, the other a military one.

Big Tent political parties embrace diverse positions but they don’t compare with the widely disparate views of Russia’s misadventures in Ukraine and the dangers of COVID vaccines.

Political leaders are not immune. Alberta’s new Premier Danielle Smith supports both antivaxxers and Russia.

Her parroting of Russian propaganda came to a wider public audience after she became premier.

Smith is coming under fire for comments she made online about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a few months before getting the province’s top job.

In a livestream on April 29, Smith was asked about her thoughts on the “peace plan for Ukraine, Russia.”

She answered by giving a hypothetical case where Canada has nuclear weapons and is aligned with Russia, and how that would upset the U.S.

“So, why would we be surprised if Russia is upset because Ukraine has nuclear weapons and is aligned with the United States?” she said in the livestream. “I think the only answer for Ukraine is neutrality.”

Her ignorance is astonishing. Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Ukraine is neutral, not a member of NATO.

On February 24, Smith was asked if areas of Ukraine should be allowed to break away and govern themselves independently.

“It seems to me the great powers of the world did a terrible job defining the new borders of countries after WWII”, Smith replied, “So much of the conflict we have had since is due to different people being crammed under one national government that don’t like each other,” the post said.

She added that nations should be allowed to break away and govern themselves independently if they want.

Of course that’s true. Quebec almost broke away from Canada in a narrow vote conducted in 1995. However, Quebec wasn’t invaded by a foreign government and forced to vote for separation while staring down the barrel of a gun.

Smith’s source of propaganda is globalresearch.ca, a website known for promoting disinformation from Russia.

A board member with the Canada-Ukraine Foundation calls the comments deeply disturbing and misinformed.

“To be honest, I was taken aback,” board member Bohdan Romaniuk told CTV News.

“With all due respect to our new premier, they demonstrate a profound ignorance of history,” he said.

Smith is not the only Canada who has fallen under the sway of Russian propaganda.

In survey conducted in March by EKOS, unvaccinated Canadians are much more likely than those who received three doses to believe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified.

The poll found 26 per cent of those who identified as unvaccinated agreed the Russian invasion is justified compared to only two per cent of surveyed Canadians who said they had three doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and who supported the invasion.

What connects the two issues? EKOS president Frank Graves says it’s clear:

“This is definitely a new and bluntly insidious force that’s contributing to polarization and disinformation and poor decision-making. And it doesn’t seem to be going away. Things are getting worse,” said Graves. “I don’t think this is because those people had an ingrained sympathy to the Russians. They’re reading this online, they’re consuming this from the same sources that were giving them the anti-vax stuff.”

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Coming next: Russia’s invasion of space

Russia is expanding its domain. Not satisfied with grinding Ukraine into submission, now Russia is threatening a war in space. President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he will use weapons to achieve his expansionary illusions on the ground and in the heavens.

image: iStock

Russia is threatening to take down Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites because they helped the Ukrainian army sink the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, Moskva. The sinking of the key warship has been seen as a humiliating blow to Moscow as the war rages on.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, tweeted: “Russia is starting a space war! Medvedev [an ally of Putin] announced a task is given to destroy @elonmusk Starlink satellites in a document by ‘United Russia [a party document].’ It says that firing on the Moskva was done with the help of Starlinks.”

It’s not an idle threat on the part of the Russians.

To demonstrate that they could take down satellites, Russia stalked an American reconnaissance satellite called USA-245 in January, 2020.  

Then the stalking Russian satellite, Kosmos-2542, split in two. In fact, the larger part spat out another, smaller craft. The smaller one moved even closer to the American satellite. Speaking later, in February, General John W. “Jay” Raymond, chief of the newly established Space Force, would describe it by saying, “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls (Harper’s, November, 2021)”

After the two Russian satellites stalked the U.S. satellite for months, the smaller Russian satellite fired a projectile. While it didn’t hit the U.S. satellite, it was a clear warning shot.

Of course, Russia claimed that the projectile wasn’t a weapon at all but merely part of a “close inspection” and that “most importantly, it did not breach any norms or principles of international law.” The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the American assessment of the events “propaganda,” and responded that the U.S. accusation was hypocrisy: the United States and Britain, it said, “naturally keep silent about their own efforts” and “programs on the possible use of … counter-satellite weapons.”

We are extremely dependent on satellites. Not only for GPS location but hurricane tracking, search-and rescue locators, financial transactions, and emergency messages -all could go dark.

The military depends on satellites. American military reliance on space has been building since Operation Desert Storm, when U.S. satellites proved a tactical advantage: American troops navigated unmarked stretches of desert using GPS and blindsided the Iraqi Army, which expected them to approach by road.

The war in space is not limited to knocking out satellites. China demonstrated a “spoofing” technology, a type of interference where a satellite’s signal is mimicked by a fake. In July 2019, a U.S. container ship in the port of Shanghai received false GPS locations and notifications of phantom ships fast approaching. The spoofing was likely sent by the China military. The captain of the ship could see with binoculars that the GPS was wrong but without visual confirmation, the spoof could have been disastrous.

The West has avoided direct war with Russia, despite Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. If Russia’s expands its war into space, we will have no alternative but to respond. In a race to destroy each other, there will be no refuge.

Putin’s hypersonic missile dreams in Ukraine

Russian President Putin just had to try out his new super-duper missile on Ukraine. While you’re bombing a country into the Stone Age, you might as while play with the new weapons in your arsenal.

image: daily express

The new missile is one that has stumped “military thinkers” for decades: how to make a weapon that that flies great distances at supersonic speeds and avoids detection by the enemy.

The dream is a hypersonic missile, essentially a glider released from a rocket or plane that can be manoeuvred. The initial speed is 20 times the speed of sound (Mach 20) but slows down as it glides to its target.

The U.S., China and Russia have been trying to make these things work for decades. The problem with them is physics.

Putin claims to have perfected hypersonic missiles as a demonstration of Russia’s superiority

A senior U.S. Defense official says their use in Ukraine is odd because the target is so close and conventional missiles are as effective and cheaper.

“It’s a bit of a head-scratcher. … Why you would need a hypersonic missile fired from not that far away to hit a building?” the official said.

The trouble with military thinkers is that they don’t think science. They come up with ideas and then hope that technology catch up.

Scientists David Wright and Cameron Tracy analyzed the physics of hypersonic missiles and found them wanting (Scientific American, August, 2021).

Hypersonic weapons promise more than they can deliver.

“Yet our studies indicate that hypersonic gliders encounter severe challenges,” say Wright and Cameron, “Physics gets in the way.”

A major problem is drag. Any object going through a fluid such as air has to plow through it, much like a boat through water. The amount of drag that a glider experiences is not directly proportional: drag increases as the square of the velocity. For example, a glider at Mach 5 is subjected to 25 times the drag force than when it flies at Mach 1. One at Mach 20 faces 400 times the drag of when it is at Mach 1.

Each turn in the glider also slows it down. Such manoeuvres can cost significant speed and range.

Another problem is heat. The leading edges of gliding missiles flying at Mach 10 or above can reach temperatures greater than 2,000 celsius. Not just the high temperatures threaten the integrity and stability of the glider but the air becomes ionized and scours away the surface of the missile.

Hypersonic missiles are supposed to reach their targets undetected by radar but even if the missile survives the roasting, the heat produces a bright infrared signal that satellites can see. They are not invisible as claimed.

Hypersonic missiles are supposed to travel faster than conventional ballistic weapons but that’s only true for high flying ballistic weapons. For those flying at lower altitudes (depressed trajectory), that’s not true.

“Our calculations show that a ballistic missile on a depressed trajectory can deliver a warhead with an equal or shorter flight time than a hypersonic weapon over the same range,” say Wright and Cameron.

Putin imagines that Russian superiority in hypersonic missiles will return the country to the glory years of Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviet Union dominated satellites.

Dream on.

Ukraine could become the theatre of a proxy war

Despite delusions of grandeur on the part of President Putin, Russia is no longer a superpower.

image: Telecom Review

Putin imagines a restoration of the glorious The Soviet Union when it spanned Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. Back then, it included multiple national republics including Ukraine.

It was a superpower to be feared. In the Sixties part of my job for Alberta Government Telephones, now TELUS, was to maintain a communications link between a string of radar stations in Canada’s North to a command centre in Colorado. It was called the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) and built in response to the threat of a potential Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) attack from the Soviet Union.

Russia, while not as powerful as The Soviet Union, still represents a threat to world order. Canada is nervously looking over the North Pole at Putin’s erratic adventures in Ukraine. Just how crazy is he? Could he have designs in the arctic?

However, the appetite for Russian arctic conquests will likely be dampened by the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. There’s nothing like boys coming home in body bags to put you off further invasions. I think arctic dreams are far from Putin’s troubled mind.

Putin has deeper worries as the Russian economy tanks. He risks becoming a client state of China.

In a recent video meeting between President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping, they discussed what to do with the problem of Putin. Russia’s antics are a distraction from the superpowers’ agenda to divide up the world; the U.S. with its hegemonic control through globalization and China through its Belt and Road infrastructure program to bring the resources of the world to China.

Taiwan continues to be a contentious issue between the U.S. and China. Biden calls China’s actions in the Taiwan Strait coercive and provocative. China regards the island state as theirs.

 The U.S. has sent weapons worth more than $2 billion to Ukrainians to fight the Russian invasion, including Stinger anti-aircraft systems and Javelin light anti-armor weapons.

Russia has asked China for weapons to bolster the Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine.

The transformation of Russia as a client state of China began in 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin travelled to Beijing after the annexation of Crimea.

Following the annexation and with sanctions from the West, there was a $400 billion deal to supply gas to China.  In 2017, Chinese banks provided US$12-billion in funding for a liquefied natural gas project on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula.

With further sanctions from the West over Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, Russia is more dependent on China. Helena Legarda, a lead analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, says:

“With the West and many allies and partners around the globe united in sanctioning Russia, the country’s economy is bound to take a severe hit, and only a few countries will be willing and able to help Russia mitigate this. China’s economic support will be key.”

It looks like a long war in Ukraine that can only be financed by the U.S. and China. The Ukraine will become a battle field in which China and the U.S. fight a proxy war.

Now’s your chance, Freedom Convoyers, to fight for Ukraine

Supporters of the Freedom Convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for three weeks are passionate about freedom.

Now’s the chance for those supporters to demonstrate their commitment to freedom and join the 20,000 people from 52 counties to stop the indiscriminate Russian shelling of schools, hospitals and ambulances in Ukraine.

Ordinary people like Lola Parsons felt moved by the Freedom Convoy. The 54 year-old began the 31-hour drive to Ottawa from St. John’s, Newfoundland; her journey was filled with “crying and laughing,” she said, as she traveled with her friends and their dog Monty in the East Coast Convoy towards the nation’s capital.

“That will tell you what kind of movement is happening in Eastern Canada right now,” said Parsons, this drive is a “journey to freedom.”

One Freedom Convoy supporter stood in front of the Ambassador Bridge and said in a video that she would she was prepared to die for the cause of freedom.

freedom fighter on Ambassador Bridge. Image: CTVNews.ca

Other supporters are ready to face physical harm. Truck driver Jacobo Peters, said he planned to lock himself in the cab of his semi and lay on the horn whenever police try to remove him. He said that they’ll have to smash the cab window and pull him out to remove him.

“Who knows, I might go home with some broken bones or go to jail with some broken bones depending on how much force they use,” said Peters. “We just want our freedoms back, and we’ve been peaceful.”

The courageous supporters of the Freedom Convoy who rallied against the tyrant Prime Minister Trudeau will have their now have a chance to go against Vladimir Putin.

Freedom Convoy fighters will have the support of Former U.S. President Donald Trump. He condemned Trudeau during a rally in Texas.  “We are with them all the way,” he said. “They have really shown something.” He said that the protesters are “resisting bravely” vaccine mandates that he called “lawless,” and “are doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders, by far.”

Freedom fighters that supported the convoy will join other courageous Canadians who are answering Ukrainian President Zelensky’s call for fighters around the world to join in the defence of Ukraine.

Freedom fighters like Canadian Yaroslav Hrytsiuk, only 18 years old and a high-school student from Toronto. He hopes to join his father in Ukraine who is preparing to fight Russians invading their home city of Lviv.

“Today, I’m going to Ukraine to stand with my family and fight for my country,” said the teenager. “The hardest thing was to convince my mother that I should go. As any mother, she says: ‘Are you nuts? Why are you going there? It’s war and you’re young,’ ”

In Victoria, Mark Preston-Horin, 43, said he has been writing his will and completing his taxes in anticipation of getting on a flight overseas to volunteer for Ukrainian forces in whatever capacity he can.

When a people’s freedom is at stake, the battle becomes deeply personal. It always surprises tyrants to discover that people can care about other people’s freedom as much as they care about their own.

The brave men and women of the Freedom Convey have demonstrated their commitment to freedom. The world is watching to see the depth of that commitment.

Will Canadians pay higher price for gas to support Ukraine?

How deep is our support for Ukraine? Are Canadians willing to pay a even more for gasoline at the pumps or is it all talk?

Vancouver gas price: image: reddit

Germany has made its choice clear. They will pay much more for natural gas after by refusing certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas line from Russia.

It’s a sacrifice that Germans are willing to make. Germany’s Foreign Minister said: “For us as the German government, it was important to show that for a free and democratic Ukraine, we are willing also to accept consequences for our national economy. Peace and freedom in Europe don’t have a price tag.”

As of now, Canadian support is tepid. In a recent poll by the Angus Reid Institute, the pollster characterizes Canadian’s support for Ukraine as being at an “arms length.”

Two thirds of respondents to the poll said they would be willing to send humanitarian aid (medicine, food, medical personnel) but only 13 per cent would see Canadian troops fighting alongside Ukrainians.

A disappointing twenty per cent want nothing to do with the invasion; they want to stay out of it completely. They have obviously forgotten how quickly a megalomaniac’s conquests can come close to home.

Now, as in the beginning of the Second World War, the conflict is seen as “over there.” Older Canadians understand how toxic that attitude can be as Hitler marched into country after to country.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices above US$100 a barrel for the first time in almost eight years.

Russia produces around 17 per cent of the world’s oil, and 13 per cent of its natural gas.

Oil was already in short supply before the invasion as we recovered from the pandemic-induced slowdowns. Rising oil prices have fueled inflation to multi-decade highs.

That’s a far cry from the early COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April of 2020. As cars and planes were parked, demand for fuel plummeted. At one point, West Texas Intermediate oil futures went negative.

With inventories tight, oil and gas sanctions of 4.3 million barrels a day from the third-largest producing country would exact a toll on everyone. But the toll of doing nothing to stop naked aggression would be greater.

Oil and gas exports account for nearly 60 per cent of Russian exports, so pinching off energy shipments would inflict the more damage to Russia than the West.

If Canada supported sanctions against Russian oil, inflation will increase: everything will cost more. Every US$10 increase in oil prices pushes up inflation by around 0.4 percentage points according to Bank of Montreal economists.

Canada has cut off Russian oil but that’s largely symbolic because imports from Russia only amount to 2.5 per cent of our total imports.

What will hurt the Russian warmongers the most is if all global supplies from Russia are cut off. Regrettably that will push the cost of gasoline even higher.

On the positive side, it would help wean us away from fossil fuels.

Canadians are willing to show support for Ukraine but how deep is that support for our fellow Canadians –Canada has the largest number of citizens of Ukrainian origin in the world, outside Russia.

Would support include a hit to the pocketbook or are we just talk?