Category: Some Scary thoughts
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is aimed at furthering the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) designs against the United States, according to analysts.
Xi’s March 20 to March 23 visit to Moscow is his first to the country since Putin’s February 2022 invasion and comes on the heels of Beijing’s brokering a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi and Putin declared a “no limits” partnership, and ties between the two countries have only deepened since then.
The meeting was announced on Friday, incidentally not long after the International Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes.
The timing of the visit is critical for both Xi and Putin, experts say.
“I think that Beijing—like most of the rest of the world—is worried that the conflict might escalate to nuclear warfare that would harm their own plans as much as anyone else,” said Brandon Weichert, a U.S.-based geopolitical analyst and author of the book “Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower.”
“At the same time, though, Beijing doesn’t mind seeing their two biggest competitors, Russia and the U.S., bleeding each other in Europe while China has free reign in the Indo-Pacific,” he told The Epoch Times.
Timing
The meeting comes as Russia slowly makes advances in its monthslong operation to capture the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut. The bloody battle has led to massive losses on both sides, especially the Russians.
Madhav Nalapat, a strategic affairs analyst and vice chair of the India-based Manipal Advanced Research Group said that Xi and Putin are meeting at a time when the war in Ukraine is entering a stage where it can either end conclusively or can drag out into a stalemate.
“Putin is under pressure from his commanders to unleash the full fury of Russian weapons against Ukraine rather than have the war get prolonged,” Nalapat told The Epoch Times. “Xi clearly wants to know whether Putin will go all out or continue with the present tactics.”
To Frank Lehberger, a Germany-based Sinologist, Xi and Putin’s “hasty arrangement” and secret get together” on Monday is because the Russian military is on the “brink of collapse” in Ukraine.
“Xi Jinping, who is since last week the sole autocrat of China, is anxious not to let this happen, because a military rout of Russian armies in Ukraine would be the end of Putin’s autocratic and anti-Western regime of Russia,” Lehberger told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Russian army has lost nearly 200,000 soldiers in the war, according to Western officials, and at least 500,000 Russians have fled the country since the war started. Lehberger said that Russian elites and nationalist hardliners are angry with Putin and hold him responsible for the situation, wanting an end to Putin’s dream to recreate a Russian empire in Europe.
“Putin desperately needs Xi to come now and pledge his help, or it will be too late for Putin and his dreams of an autocratic empire,” said Lehberger.
“Xi knows all this, and he also desperately needs Russia to fight on ….not only against Ukrainians but by association against the entire democratic West or NATO, which are the CCP’s existential enemies.”
Nalapat said that Russia losing a war to Ukraine would weaken China’s position significantly in the international order and the timing of the meeting is mindful of that.
Lethal Arms for Russia
There has been rising apprehension about China supplying military assistance to Russia. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said last month that China is already providing “non-lethal” weapons to Russia during the war and is considering supplying lethal ones. Beijing denies these claims.
While much has been made of Xi’s purported role as peacemaker in the conflict, experts said that this is just a smokescreen, pointing to Beijing’s supply of “dual-use” equipment to Moscow that aids its military efforts.
Weichert said that China has long been providing “vital support and supplies” to Russia.
“The Biden administration knows full well that there are Chinese ‘technicians’ working alongside Wagner Group units in Bakhmut, helping them to maintain the drone fleets that Chinese drone makers have sold to the Russians,” he said, referring to the private mercenary group.
The Wagner Group purchased more than 2,500 Chinese drones in a deal between the mercenary group and Russian and Chinese intelligence, British media outlet Daily Mirror reported, citing a UK intelligence report.
Nalapat said that misleading the enemy is a “standard operating procedure” for the CCP, noting that the regime is supplying arms to Russia through discrete channels.
“Do you believe that the flood of weapons, many sophisticated, coming to Russia from North Korea and Iran have all been made in those two countries?” he said.
According to a recent Politico report citing customs data, Chinese firms have exported 1,000 assault rifles and other equipment to Moscow that could be used in the conflict.
In June 2022, for example, Russian firm Tekhkrim imported rifles from China North Industries Group Corporation Limited, a large state-owned defense contractor. The data also showed that Russian companies received 12 shipments of drone parts and over 12 tons of body armor from China via Turkey in late 2022.
In response to this report, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told The Epoch Times that the administration couldn’t confirm that China has in fact provided lethal aid to Russia.
Lehberger said that “All these activities are in contravention of current international sanctions,” adding that the reported efforts are only the tip of the iceberg.
In addition to Iran and North Korea, China is also sending arms to Russia through other countries like Myanmar, Serbia, Turkey, and Russia’s staunch ally in Europe, Belarus, according to Lehberger.
After his summit with Putin, Xi will talk via satellite link to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the first time since the invasion. Lehberger termed this as Xi’s “make-believe peace mission.”
According to the expert, Xi will aim at a temporary cease-fire to earn recovery time for Putin’s depleted army and Russia will “at a later time” attack Ukraine more fiercely.
Lehberger said that the CCP will continue to supply arms to Russia for at least another two years, because he believes that Xi has plans to take over Taiwan in 2025 and would thus wish to use prolonged Ukraine-Russian conflict to stun or weaken the United States and other Western powers.
China’s Economic Stake
Experts said that China has long-term economic agendas vis-a-vis the Russia-Ukraine war and its economic goals over the next decades are linked with Beijing’s subjugation of the Russian economy.
“Russia is squarely in the camp of China’s new empire; the vast Russian wilderness will become protein for which the dragon can feed on as it rises over the next decade, and Putin will become a powerful vassal prince under Xi Jinping,” said Weichert, adding that fusing the Chinese and Russian economies would be a major victory for Xi and for that, it would need Russia to be ensnared in a protracted conflict with Ukraine.
Nalapat said that Russia has become China’s most important supplier of industrial raw materials at discounted prices. The two countries want to work together to topple the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.
“A weakened U.S. dollar would in their view boost their own currencies, especially the RMB [Chinese yuan]. For some time, much of U.S. deficit funding has come from increases in overseas purchases of USD as a reserve currency, and a dollar reset would significantly crimp the ability to spend of the U.S. government,” he said.
Xi wants the United States to not only be weakened but also be deprived of reliable and functioning allies within Europe, according to Lehberger who sees the Ukraine war as vital to Beijing’s economic game plan against Washington.
“A weak E.U. will then be earmarked to become an economic dependency of China,” Lehberger said.
The seriousness of our predicament cannot be overstated. We’re in the clutches of the insane with no institutional integrity, no political allies, no military allies, no cultural solidarity on which to draw. At best we are vindicated in our points of view by scattered media outlets of limited reach. At the same time, we’re being targeted, victimized and pursued by the very bureaucracies we’ve funded and supported through taxes, however unwillingly.
The only means of survival both figuratively and literally is in noncompliance. Easier said than done, because they’re coming at us from every direction with everything they have, all the weight of the federal government, the banking institutions, the medical establishment, the national and international corporations.
Who are we then, the individuals, to stop them?
Understand that you, the individual, is the target, because you are the strength and the soul of America and to that end, the dangerous, rebellious villains in their designs. They think if they can separate you from all others you can be controlled, dominated. They cannot be allowed to separate us. They have already proven that if they spread fear they can drive millions into cages and willfully accept poison as sustenance. This is what the pandemic proved to them and cannot be undone, unproven. Every level of deceit that works, is a level that must be overcome by refusal to accept it.
Those who pretend this is an America that has ever existed before are lying to themselves. Never has there been so many evils among us. Never has there been so much corruption, so much disregard for laws by those entrusted to enforce them. We are lost, cast upon a sea of troubles.
Our only salvation is in each other, taking strength from those who stand solidly and refuse to be dominated and incorporating that strength into our own resistance. You must refuse, no matter what it costs, because the ultimate cost is not only to you, but to your children, if indeed children will be possible in the future. Consider that for the evil that it is. Those alive today might be the last generation to survive the sterilization, the poison injections, the blood clots, the sex trafficking to arrive at adulthood.
The irrational excuses for taking the vaxx are so the victim can enjoy life, take a vacation, go to work, etc. Really? And when the vaxx kills you, clogs your heart with white, fibrous material, stopping the blood in the arteries, what then will be the reason for compliance other than compliance itself? This is the danger of doing as one is told rather than considering what has been told and then investigating the pros and cons of it and coming to a rational decision. If certain death is already on one side of the ledger, the rest need not be so vigorously investigated. The answer is no.
Next up will be the economic crisis where everyone discovers that the money promised to them in their bank accounts is not really theirs, hasn’t been theirs since they opened the bank account, when they gave it to the bank and then was allowed to pull it back out on certain conditions.
Soon, those conditions will no longer exist and when the bank decides it’s time for a bail-in rather than a bail-out, they’ll just take it. It will disappear from the account. Now, if that inspires one to act out in a violent way, there’ll be plenty of cops there to ensure that one does not.
When you talk about criminals, the worst sort are the kind that have police protection. At what point, then do the cops themselves become the criminals? That’s a question they should be asking themselves right now, as individuals, as Americans, as parents.
The only thing that will stop any of this, throw sand in the gears of the New World Order, is to band together and refuse to comply. Do not accept a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) unless you want that threat of a bail-in every time you get a paycheck.
There will come a time when everyone in America has to stop working until they are presented with an acceptable means of compensation. I suggest that CBDC’s are not acceptable, that they should have left the banking system alone, because after they take everything in the checking account one time, the only acceptable means of compensation should be cash, silver or gold.
If we fail that test, too, we will be enslaved by a digital currency able to be withheld at any moment, for any reason and whatever work one has done over the past week or month, will be for nothing. How long will you work, if your compensation is constantly threatened? Not one minute, if you understand the issues being presented.
I have suggested in the past the idea of an Autonomous County, one where the fundamental rights of the individual are secured, where laws and dictates from the WHO and the UN are ignored and repudiated.
To that end, I’ve written up a justification for and explanation of an Autonomous County for those who have requested more information. It’s one tactic that can help individuals band together on a smaller scale, test out the resistance and consolidate influence over the state. At worst, it allows those red counties in blue states the structure by which to entertain the Greater Idaho method of resistance to irrational and largely insane dictates of the high population centers (the true evil of democracy).
We’re on our own, so we better start figuring out how to work together against the massive forces arrayed against us. We have the tools in the fact that they have to commit crimes and act unconstitutionally in order to pursue their agenda, we just need to mark out our territory, find ways to hold them accountable and pursue charges of treason whenever and however we can. There are a lot of good ideas out there, but we need to pick one and start using it. Unless, we’re just going to wait for the nuclear war to do the work for us, but that mentality has gotten us here.
Once the criminal is identified, his mobile tracking device (cell phone) will be accessed with a search warrant or some type of commercial database software. Teams of armed cops will know where the criminal is at all times and will make plans to arrest him in the safest way possible.
Many of our future “cops” will be computer analysts. Those specialized analysts will be paid less than they would in the private market. They will supplement their salaries by taking bribes from wealthy constituents to use the surveillance systems to gather dirt on political enemies. Trust in the police will further erode and many police jobs will be highly politicized.
Earlier this week, the always excellent and interesting Baldilocks shared a thread on Twitter dealing with the perceptions and thoughts of a certain class of Russians in regards the war. The thread is well worth reading, as are some of the comments to her tweet and my retweet.
What was reported matches what I am seeing and hearing from that class, and from others. For all that one must support the war in public, or face draconian consequences, even in private it has a lot of support. As in a WAG on my part of better than fifty percent. Yes, there are segments that don’t support and are not thrilled with things, and they tend to fall more on ethnic lines from what I’m seeing. Overall, the war has a surprising strong, wide, and deep level of support within Russia. Not universal, but pretty darn significant.
Support for Vladimir remains quite high. This varies as one goes through demographics and ethnicities, but overall strong. Two areas where this may not be true are in what I call the political oligarchia: the politicians, power brokers, oligarchs, and wanna-be oligarchs who make up the upper levels of power. The old nomenklatura concept is dead and gone. In public, this upper level is very pro-Vladimir. In private, well, it’s still not clear to me if some of what is going on behind the scenes is simply preparation for his retirement or death, or if there is something more active going on. To be fair, there are days I’m not sure those playing the great game in Russia truly know themselves. The other area is the bottom of the demographics pile, which tends to be ‘yeah, support, whatever; none of them give a damn about us.’ That may be as close to a universal concept across cultures as anything.
An important point within this is the response of that educated class to the pushback by Ukraine, NATO, and others. Note the surprise, shock even, that Europe and others not only opposed the invasion, but that they are helping Ukraine (most of whom are sadly misled and should be welcoming the return of Russia) resist. That they would potentially gut their economies to do so. This is seen as bigotry and ignorance by that class of Russians. And by others within Russia, to be honest.
That plays almost perfectly into the great Russian paranoia that everyone is out to get them. That has been a hallmark of Rus/Slav psychology going back into ancient times. They have always been treacherously set upon by others, even as they were peacefully raping, murdering, and pillaging those that set upon them. Now, Russia does have a few legitimate times when they weren’t doing something like that at the time they were attacked, but I am overall reminded of a certain criminal class here in the U.S. that was never ‘doing nothing’ when “attacked” by those they were robbing, etc.
It also brings to the fore a concept that seems to continue to elude far too many: outside reactions and considerations were not and are not a factor of consideration. The war was not started with Western or other reaction in mind, other than that it was felt that the Biden Regency and others would just go along with it and not do anything of significance against it. Token reparations maybe, but that was it. Given that the Regency and the Meat Puppet seemed to be egging it on at one point, I can see how they thought that. But, that was only a fleeting thought to them and not even a serious point of consideration.
The dynamics that drove the decision to invade are almost entirely internal. They are based in culture, politics, and other areas that create the internal dynamics that are not understood and not even being considered by far too many outside of Russia. There is no path to peace without taking those dynamics, and the overwhelming support for the war and for creating a new Russkiy Mir, into consideration.
Therein lies the problem. Outside opinions and even responses do not matter to the large majority of the population of the Russian Federation. At best, such are seen as bigotry and an attack. At worst, they were not even a consideration. That holds true for the leadership as well. For all intents and purposes, the people of the Russian Federation live in a bubble, and the upper leadership lives in an even more dense and impenetrable bubble.
Stephen Green, who does some truly great coverage I do recommend reading, has two (sadly VIP) posts up, here and here, on “Putin’s Stupid and Unnecessary War.” By our standards, completely true and valid statements. The war is stupid, unnecessary, and even foolish. From a Russian societal perspective, however, it is extremely necessary and even overdue. Stephen asks a good question that I can see before it hits the paywall, about the military leadership should have known the military was not ready and should have prevented the war as a result.
Again, by our standards and culture, an obvious point. By the standards of Russian culture, however, invalid. Keep in mind the two bubbles already mentioned, as there are more. Vladimir sacked a lot of real generals a while back so that various apparatchiks, oligarchs, and wanna-be oligarchs could get in on the fun of what we would see as outright corruption. Russians today just see it as how business is done. Those that were smart cut officers in on the take, and smart officers made sure the men didn’t starve. As it was, the troops often looted items to sell on the black so they got pay, food, etc. Gundecking reports has a long and honorable tradition in Russia going back almost to the very earliest days. Yet more bubbles, and people who needed to know things didn’t. Given the lack of esteem given to the military these days, the general public and leadership really didn’t care if they starved or not, or what was happening to them. Or what would happen if they had to go to war.
It was only when war came, and some people got a cold douche of reality, that anything began to change. Part of that change was that a number of people in demographics and ethnicity that meant they would be called up to fight decided to beat feet. Quite a few citizens of the Russian Federation, and not just the government, consider them traitors to be dealt with later and who should never ever think of returning to the Rodina. Understand, your average citizen of the Russian Federation has no problem with people dying for the war and the cause of Russkiy Mir — so long as it’s not them. Marginalized groups or ethnicities? Who cares, it will improve the gene pool.
Nuclear war? Go for it. Our mighty Russian military will protect us while devastating our enemies. We have far more bombs and missiles than they do. We have far greater, more powerful, and more accurate defenses against missiles and other attacks.
That their nuclear and nuclear defense forces might be in a shape similar to their other weapons and stockpiles has penetrated few if any bubbles as far as I can tell. How many will work (on either side)? Who knows, and I’d really rather not find out. That said, I’m in the camp of 20 percent, i.e. an 80 percent failure rate. In light of this, I also highly recommend reading this from Sgt. Mom. Our own military is in many ways in no better shape. We are not capable of fighting a one front war for more than a few days (if that), much less a two-front war as we are supposed to be able to do.
Which leads us, finally, to the growing “peace at any price crowd.” I’m seeing it a lot on social media these days, and from some surprising quarters. As I noted in posts before, putting in place a cease fire or a forced peace as things stand will only guarantee a far worse war with far worse consequences later. Even one that gives Ukraine the Donbas and Russia the Crimea will result in the same. See this post and this post for some of the previous discussion on outcomes.
Right now, I do not see any easy, good outcomes. Far too much of what is being discussed and pushed is not in touch with the reality of Russian culture and internal dynamics, much less that of Ukraine. Anything that does not take such into consideration will fail. Spectacularly. Creating something viable, or at least make each step suck the least, requires strong, informed, and capable leadership. Looking at the Biden Regency, Castreaux, Macaroon, Charles/Sunak, Shultz, Vladimir, etc., yeah, right.
Prepare, pray, and hope for the best. It’s about all we truly can do right now.
Getting hit by lightning is not fun! If you w