Do not “pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued�. This was the instruction given by the US State Department to its investigators over a year ago, as reported by Vanity Fair in a long piece on Lab Leak. State Department investigators were warned against “digging in sensitive places� and repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box�.

What were they afraid of? They were afraid that someone might reveal that the deadly virus was cooked up by Chinese cooks under American guidance. The hands were Chinese, but the voice was that of Uncle Sam (Gen 27:22). In plain words, if the Chinese altered (Gain-of-Function’ed) the natural coronavirus, they did so on the orders of their American partners and according to their instructions. It is even more probable that the Chinese contribution was secondary, for they do not possess the know-how necessary to alter a virus. Whether it was an accidental leak of a bioweapon or the intentional deployment of bioterror (as Ron Unz expounded), in either case the US is the leading actor in the story.

President Trump threatened to sue Beijing for ten trillion dollars for the Wuhan lab leak. Good idea! But this princely sum should be charged to Washington (or rather New York with its Wall Street) as well as to Beijing. Actually, we didn’t have to wait until the end of May 2021 for this revelation. The basic facts were covered in the viral videos Plandemic and Plandemic II, released almost a year ago and promptly banned. Here you can watch a condensed (7 minutes), yet very convincing version of these two long videos, published last August. The creators conclude their story with ‘a plague on both your houses’ statement: “The US could say China did it, China could say the US did it. And both were right.�

The video (narrated by Dr David E. Martin and released by London real, the company owned by Brian Rose, a Jewish businessman from San Diego, CA, who is closely connected to the City of London) shows that work on Coronavirus began in 1999; the CDC filed a patent application on SARS-CoV in 2004; it was granted in 2007. They kept tampering with the virus for a few years, trying to make it more infectious and more deadly. After gain-of-function research was forbidden by the US government in 2014, it was promptly offshored to Wuhan lab. The research was quietly continued with US grants coming (partly) from the notorious Dr Fauci via the equally notorious Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance, the beneficiary of $39 million grant from the Pentagon. The Pentagon is a great humanitarian organization known for its love of mankind, right? If they forwarded so much money to Wuhan, they surely had our good in mind. Probably it was out of sheer modesty that they hid the grants, via a web of multiple transactions, passing money from one NGO to another until reaching its final destination in Wuhan. In 2017, the work on weaponising the virus was resumed in the US, while President Trump stopped the grants to Wuhan.

The united media and social networks unleashed their ferocious fact-checkers against the video and its conclusion that the Chinese did it on US orders. And for a long time the story disappeared. But now that the Lab Leak story has been unbanned (thanks to Nicholas Wade’s impactful story) we can check the fact-checkers and find them sorely missing actual arguments. Their main reasoning, beside labelling different opinions “debunked� or “discredited�, was based on an article in Lancet that was commissioned and produced under the guidance of the very same Peter Daszak who admitted (in 2016) that he commissioned and funded Chinese scientists to create a ‘Killer Coronavirus’. Thus the debunkers were debunked and the discrediters were discredited.

The conclusion that the virus was made by Chinese under US instructions was also reached over a year ago, in April 2020, by Tsarfat, a French-Jewish blogger, who claimed that Ralph S. Baric was the man who weaponised the virus in 2015, “and described without any inhibition how he took what appears to be a natural strain of a bat virus and altered its properties by adding HIV strains (the Spike Protein in question). The original virus that Baric manipulated in his team’s 2015 work was provided by a team of Chinese scientists which claimed its discovery in a 2013 Nature article.� What about suing Dr Baric and Gilead Sciences for some of the billions? Or Facebook for blocking this important information? Or, indeed, Dr Fauci, who covered up for Baric and for Daszak?

(Fauci has been declared the sexiest man alive, no more and no less like Henry Kissinger in his time, and probably by the same sort of people. Recently another Fauci, Jacob Fauci, made his appearance in East Jerusalem, where he argued that he intends to steal a Palestinian house because “if I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.” Jacob (or Yaakov) Fauci is a fervent Jewish nationalist settler. Is he a close relative of Tony the Sexiest? I wonder!)

The Russians agree with Ron Unz. They think the virus was crafted by US scientists. While Putin avoided answering this question directly, Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin and a minister of the Eurasian Commission, provided the whole script. In his view,

…The virus was synthesized in a well-known US laboratory by order of a scientific foundation closely associated with certain structures of the American financial oligarchy, then moved by ethnic Chinese to a Wuhan laboratory and released into the environment there. The purpose of this operation was to destabilize the socio-political situation in the PRC in order to create the prerequisites for a revolutionary situation. It fully fits into the logic of the global hybrid war, unleashed by the American financial oligarchy in order to maintain world domination in the confrontation with the rapidly growing China.

What does Lukashenko think of himself and of his country? Doesn’t he act like the King of Israel? Israel permits itself to kill and kidnap its enemies, wherever they are. The US also entitles itself to do whatever it finds necessary; kidnapping hundreds and dumping them in Guantanamo, or just killing them, as they killed Soleimani. But other states? No, God forbid! They should placidly accept whatever their betters decide and play by the rules.

However, Luka (as he is called affectionately) is made of a sterner stuff. This is the man who flatly refused to lockdown his nation; he carried out the VE-day parade in his capital Minsk on May 9, 2020, when the rest of the world was scared witless to leave their homes. And now he detained the NEXTA guy, Roman Protasevich, the organiser of last year’s protests in Minsk. Roman P. laughed at the extradition requests in safety of Warsaw; his NEXTA has offered millions in reward for Luka’s arrest. Now unexpectedly he is in the jail. He laughs best who laughs last.

The Russian social networks were very pleased. They cooked up the photo of their James Bonds, of Petrov and Boshirov of Salisbury fame, flying the plane into Minsk. Though cautious Russians probably weren’t involved, the hearts of Russians were all for Luka who arrested the Hipster.

At Sochi, the Black Sea resort and warm-climate-residence of Russian presidents, Putin received Lukashenko well, offered him a dip in the sea, and pooh-poohed Western threats. It’s just emotions, he said, an outburst of emotions. It will pass soon.

He referred to the disturbing EU recommendation to close the skies over Belarus, a direct threat to Russia, another tightening of the Iron Curtain. It would be uncomfortable for Russia and expensive for Belarus if these limitations were to persist. However, Russian support means that Belarus has nothing to worry about. And the US didn’t order its aviation to avoid Belarus, as opposed to Europeans. It is expensive to fly around Belarus; let the Europeans foot the bill.

Russia is coping with the New World Order, and doing well. It is the freest country in the world today, with theatres, museums and churches open, restaurants full of visitors, and there is a vaccine for everyone willing to take it. But this freedom was achieved through tremendous efforts, and Russia’s allies are not as capable of resisting the West. They are smaller, and it is easier to put pressure on them. Belarus, the Russian balcony over Europe, sticks out between US satellite states, and is vulnerable. The encirclement of Russia and its allies would have become a reality but for the long and friendly Chinese border.

Belarus has positioned itself as the Western hub of Chinese influence, as the westernmost ally and friend of China. Russian nationalists say Belarus is more pro-Chinese than pro-Russian. Belarus is a Eurasian state, says Lukashenko, thus connecting his country to both Russia and China. If the skies over Belarus were closed, Chinese access to Europe would suffer. It would also open a window for a sudden missile attack on Russia. For this reason among others, many Russian analysts consider the Ryanair affair a provocation. They say the West primed the trap and knew of all in advance. The Western states responded so fast and so massively that an advanced knowledge seems inescapable conclusion.

The CIA played a gambit: they sacrificed a young man of little importance in order to undermine China and Russia and strengthen the hand of Biden, due to meet Putin shortly. Others say just the opposite, the Belarus KGB achieved a great success, while the Western-sponsored Belarusian opposition have received a terrible blow. Even more conspiratorially-minded experts say it was a Russian operation, aiming to tie too-independent Belarus to its giant neighbour.

Indeed there isn’t enough certainty about the Ryanair events to rule out a provocation. Lukashenko says he would have demanded that the plane land in Minsk if he had known Roman P. was on board the plane. But he didn’t know, he says. We know for certain that a Minsk airport traffic controller informed the captain of the Ryanair aircraft that an email had been received (ostensibly from Hamas) claiming that there was a bomb onboard the aircraft that would explode over Vilnius airport. The threat was dubious; Hamas has never blown up planes, but it used suicide bombers to blow up buses in Israel so no one could guarantee it was a hoax.

All over the world, in the East and the West, all bomb threats are treated as though they were real even if they are much more often a hoax. Last year, Russia suffered thousands of hoax bomb threats; usually claiming a school was booby-trapped. These hoax threats are often traced to the Ukraine, where is an active and rabidly anti-Russian neo-Nazi network. Despite the near certainty that it is a hoax, Russian authorities invariably treat these threats as the real thing. So does the West. In August last year, British RAF scrambled two fighter jets to intercept a Ryanair liner because of a security threat; it turned out to be a mobile phone forgotten in a toilet.

Thus it is standard procedure to take security measures. In any case, it is the captain’s right and duty to decide. The captain decided to turn towards the Minsk airport. This is a fact – there is a record of the conversations between the aircraft and the airport. On the way to Minsk airport, a Belarusian fighter jet accompanied the plane. It had been scrambled, according to standard procedure, as the airliner drew close to Minsk airport and passed near the nuclear power plant. Ryanair records confirm that the fighter jet did not intercept the liner, did not threaten it, and was not perceived by the captain as a threat. While it is possible Belarus knew about the hoax (or even arranged the hoax) there is no way to prove it.

After the plane landed, the passengers got off and were taken to the terminal. While they were waiting for the immigration inspection, Ms Sapega, the NEXTA guy’s girlfriend, took a photo of him on her smartphone and sent the photo to their mutual friend. He posted the photo on Telegram, saying their leader is in Minsk! This is how the Belarusian authorities learned that this person, who had long been wanted by police, was found on their territory. He was therefore detained. This is the story coming from Belarusian authorities, and it could be true (or not). In any case, there was no hijacking of an aircraft, no forced landing, no other questionable acts. Whether Belarusian authorities knew from the start that a wanted man was on board does not matter at all. After the publication of the photo of the man on Telegram, they could not even pretend that they did not know.

And what if they had known of the young man’s presence onboard? Even if it were so, they were still acting in their own right. Any country has the right to land any civil aircraft flying in its own airspace. This not only follows from the idea of sovereignty, but is also confirmed by practice.

In 2016, Kiev authorities scrambled jets and, under the threat, forced a Belavia flight on its route to Minsk to return and land in Kiev. After landing, they removed and detained a passenger – the Russian-Armenian expert Armen Martirosyan. Why? Because he (jokingly, according to him) said by phone from the airport before take-off that he was carrying dirt on Ukrainian President Poroshenko with him. He in fact did not have any documents; he was later released; but the act of forcing the plane to land did not cause any international reaction.

As a teenage girl, kidnapped and locked in a cellar by a paedophile maniac, scratches his horrible leering face with her sharp nails, Gaza sends her homemade rockets to Tel Aviv. They can’t cause much damage; they are just bits of rusty iron, dangerous in the unlikely event of a direct hit, but they woke up the beast in the monster. He carefully took away every sharp object from her reach, he starved her for years to make her placid and compliant, he made sure she’d have no chance to see or gain freedom, and all of a sudden such terrible pain, such deep scratches! I have the right of self-defence, he shouts while unleashing his F-16 jets to bomb her into the stone age; and his sidekick, the senile US President, repeats after him: he has the right of self-defence! As long as she scratches, he may and should smack her! No cease-fire until she is beaten into obedience; and the US vetoed the Security Council resolution supported by 15 out of 16 members. To be on the safe side, the White House approved the sale of precise weaponry to Israel for the sum of $735 million, so they would be able to do a 9/11 to any high-rise of their choice, not only in New York. And they used the weapons to great effect.

The vetoed resolution said what should be done right away. Israel should cease bombing Gaza, refrain from interfering with holy sites, stop grabbing Palestinian homes and lands. The US refused to approve that. This is far from enough: the violated girl should be let out of the cellar. That is, Palestinians should be allowed to move freely in their own land. The Israeli army should get out of Palestinian land. The blockade of Gaza should be removed. A goy and a Jew should have equal rights, as in the US. All apartheid laws should be made null and void. Human dignity respected. And then the girl should also be allowed to live in peace. Stolen lands and homes restored to rightful owners; refugees returned, free elections taking place. But we are very far from this point.

My friends and colleagues thought the Palestinians of Gaza could inflict defeat on Israel, or at least cause considerable pain to the maniac. Alas, not yet. The Palestinians are improving their response ability. During the First Intifada (1987), they used stones against the army; in the Second Intifada (2001), they used guns; at this Third Intifada (2021) they use rockets. But they are defeated each time, and their life becomes worse with each defeat. Before the First Intifada, Palestinians could move freely; before the Second Intifada, they had their autonomy in the West Bank; now they have none worth its salt; and what will be taken away from them after the present round of struggle we shall see. That’s why, though the Palestinian position is quite awful, the ordinary Palestinians of the West Bank are not all that keen to enter an armed struggle against the formidable enemy. Desperate young people, who see no future worth living, enter such a struggle. And Gaza, this prisoner’s managed open-air-jail administration, stepped into the breach. For Gazans, there is little difference between a life that is a living hell and death that may be better. They are being severely punished for their bold action.

Jews of Israel didn’t suffer much, though more than they expected. Their famed intelligence failed them again. The Shabak, the internal intelligence service, predicted Gaza wouldn’t respond by actions beyond protests at the land grab in Jerusalem and the invasion of the al-Aqsa Mosque. They were wrong. The Shabak was certain Gaza had no rockets able to reach Tel Aviv, or just a few, in the worst case scenario. They were wrong again. The Shabak didn’t expect the thoroughly tamed Palestinians of Israel, the second-class citizens of the Jewish state, would rise in revolt. But it happened.

The centre of this rising is Lydda (Lod), the city of St George; the saint is buried here, in the beautiful old Orthodox church. By the UN partition resolution of 1947, this Palestinian town was supposed to become a part of the Palestinian state, but Jews occupied it, massacred its inhabitants, expelled survivors and repopulated it with freshly imported North African Jews. Still, a sizable Palestinian minority survived and clung to their homes. After years of terrible discrimination, they rose against their Jewish masters in revolt, for the first time since 1948. The same happened in Jaffa and Acre, cities with a similar history.

The bands of armed militant Jews, assisted by police, ran a classic anti-Arab pogrom, as supposedly Cossacks did against Jews in the beginning of the twentieth century.

They broke windows, burned shops, firebombed Arab apartments; mobbed Arabs on the street. Such pogroms took place all over Israel, even in Jewish Bat Yam, where an Arab had had an ice cream parlour for years. It was utterly destroyed. An Arab child has been burned (not fatally) by a Molotov cocktail thrown by a Jewish militant. Pogroms did happen over a hundred years ago in the Ukraine (incidentally, never in Russia proper), but then Russian writers lamented and expressed their solidarity with suffering Jews. Now, almost no Jewish writers have expressed their sorrow or stood with the Arabs. The Israeli Arabs, that is Palestinians with Israeli citizenship went out today (Tuesday) on national strike in support of their disenfranchised brethren. And the West Bank is also waking up.

Hundreds of martyred Palestinians created a huge wave of empathy for the suffering people. There were massive demonstrations in New York, in Paris, in London and elsewhere. The Arabs in the Arab countries also demonstrated wherever they were allowed to. To be sure, Israel does not give a damn about demos abroad; they are used to condemnations. It is a part of Jewish experience, to be condemned with a very good reason. The Jews like to claim there is no reason at all, just “anti-Semitism�, but this claim rings hollow in face of the murdered children of Gaza. The Jews are condemned because they deserve condemnation.

Only a rabid antisemite would say Gaza is worse than Auschwitz. No, it is better, but only just. And it has gone on longer, year upon year, with no end in sight.

And this war has at last awakened the empathy of the world: this was a paramount reason for Gaza’s daring attack. Now, a fast rewind is needed. Ostensibly, the current events started over a week ago, when the Israeli court (probably the most immoral of Jewish institutions) ruled to expel some Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem and give the buildings to the Jewish Ku Klux Klan. Protesters were beaten by the police and gendarmerie; among the beaten, there was an MP (Member of Parliament/Knesset) from the Communist Party, a Jew by origin, who supported the Palestinians.

Then during the last days of Ramadan, the Israeli police and army infested al-Aqsa Mosque. They dropped hundreds of shock grenades upon the worshippers; these grenades produced a rain of sparks. Some trees in the mosque compound caught fire. At that time, thousands of Jewish militants gathered at the Wailing Wall at the bottom of al-Aqsa. As they saw fire and smoke rise from the yard, they presumed the mosque was on fire, and they broke into triumphal cheering and singing, calling their god’s vengeance upon the goyim.

[Video Aqsa fire]

The digital giants have taken over the world. Nobody has ever amassed this much power. Hitler would die of envy if shown the greatness of Google. Huxley and Orwell’s protagonists could only dream of what Bezos and Gates do. The latter overthrew the US President and installed one they prefer, and for good reason. The combined net worth of the top 100 ultra-rich people in the US has skyrocketed by $195 billion since Biden took office, according to Bloomberg’s calculations. These giants control the minds of billions. Nations hock their lands and industries to purchase their patent medicines. These giants know our faces, our names, all about us, even the cells we are made of, down to the last protein. Gods have been defeated, gentle Christ and mighty Sabaoth, not to mention angry Allah. Is that a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? (Eccl 1:10) No, my jaundiced ancestor was right — it has already been done in the ages before us.

Once upon a time, the giants almost pushed the gods off Olympus. Apollodorus tells us that the gods could not win, until they remembered the oracle that the giants would only be defeated if a mortal man was to help the gods. Only Man can facilitate the gods’ victory over the giants, divined the Greeks in their Gigantomachy, just as the Christians knew only a Son of Man could defeat Death. When the giants had almost defeated the gods, a mortal man, Heracles, stepped forward and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Now we are in dire need of a brave mortal to tackle giants. If there is no Heracles, anyone will do; but the giants have to be defeated. And indeed, unlikely Giant Killers have stepped forward.

The uprising began in rebellious Moscow, where the city arbitration tribunal demanded that Google restore a deleted YouTube account or pay billions of dollars in fines. Impossible, you’d say — Google is free to do whatever they want. They shadow-banned Unz.com; its brother giant Twitter banned Trump; there is no way to overturn their decisions, for such companies are private, and private property is sacred — otherwise it’s Communism and Gulag; they can do whatever they want, and their smart lawyers have already included their right to unplug you in every one-click contract agreement.

Yet Russia isn’t all that different from any other Western nation. Until this happened, the Russian legal system had refused to consider claims against the tech giants. Russian law did not allow for it. It was enough for the giants to stipulate that all claims should go to London or to some other tame court of their preference for the Russians to meekly submit. However, the giants overreached themselves when they blocked this avenue to sue them in Western jurisdiction for many Russians. The Russians responded by creating a new law that established the priority of their national law, and required the courts and tribunals to accept and judge the cases if there is no way to sue in the agreed Western jurisdiction.

This new law was applied by the Moscow Arbitration Tribunal after Google, in July 2020, deleted the account of Tsargrad, a Christian conservative TV channel and news agency belonging to Konstantin Malofeev, an unusual Russian digital media lord. Slate magazine made a profile of the man some years ago, while he was still planning to create Tsargrad. Slate grossly exaggerated Malofeev’s proximity and importance to Putin, for he is an outsider, but otherwise it gives you the general idea. Malofeev had been sanctioned by US and EU authorities in 2014, but the account of the media company he is the main owner of was blocked six years later, in the summer of 2020. Tsargrad had over one million subscribers when suddenly, and without warning, YouTube deleted its account. At first, they explained their action by asserting that Tsargrad was “breaking the community rules’, as always. Later on, Google claimed they blocked Tsargrad because its owner had been sanctioned.

The Moscow tribunal rejected both claims. (Read here the tribunal decision in full, English translation comes after Russian version) It stated that Google didn’t prove Tsargrad broke community rules; even had that been the case, Google would have had to give six months’ warning before breaking the contract. As for sanctions, the Tribunal ruled that US and EU sanctions are a part of public law of those particular countries, and cannot be applied in Russia; Google has to restore their account or suffer legal consequences.

The consequences are financial, and exponential. For the first week of non-compliance, Google would have to pay a little over one thousand dollars, nothing to speak about there. But afterwards, the fines double each week, and in half a year’s time Google would have to pay over $70 billion! Exponential fines can be very threatening. Can the Russians make Google pay? Yes! Google (google.ru) has a few billions on their accounts in Russia, all eminently liable to be seized. On the other hand, if Google restores the blocked account, they won’t have to pay a cent. Stories related to this historical decision are filed here (in Russian).

Anyway, Malofeev had been sanctioned by the US and EU over six years ago, when he was allegedly supporting the Russian rebels in Donbas (he says he ran a humanitarian mission). Why, all of a sudden, did Google freeze his account in 2020?

There is an honest answer to this question, but Google’s cagey lawyers would never admit to it. In 2020, encouraged by their meteoric rise to the top of the pandemic-troubled world, Google and the other giants unleashed their might to erase ideologically unacceptable (for them) media. They carried out a large-scale ideological cleansing of pro-family, Trump-friendly, conservative, Christian sites and accounts, and of sites that didn’t support the paradigm of gay and trans, anti-male, anti-white woke propaganda. The sites that doubted the official Covid narrative were also banned or shadow-banned. They forbid their clients to trust in God, summed it up a Russian observer. The timing of the cleansing was connected with the US Presidential elections of November 2020. The giants planned to remove Trump and install Biden by hook or by crook. Accounts that were likely to disagree with this massive fraud planned by the giants were deleted. Didn’t this constitute meddling in the important elections? For sure, but it was the giants, not the Russians, who meddled, and they even had FBI on their payroll.

Not only did American accounts suffer in this purge; the giants cleansed Russian accounts, too. Though there aren’t many Russian-reading voters in the US, the giants didn’t want to take any chances. They planned and executed probably the first complete global takeover of discourse in human history. Tsargrad was one of the smothered media voices.

Malofeev in Tsargrad office

The US has been fighting two wars: with Ukraine against Russia, and with Russia against Climate. Both are very costly, both bring no profit to Americans, both are entirely unnecessary, but both are essential for the Biden regime at this time, as the Covid pandemic runs out of steam. How will matters proceed?

The Ukrainian war may have been postponed. Russian troops withdrew from their forward positions on the Ukrainian border to their permanent bases. Perhaps Putin decided that the threat of a powerful Russian response would suffice for Kiev to give up their plans of a Donbas invasion. It was a close call: Kiev artillery shelled Donbas; Russian tanks faced them waiting for the order to roll westward, but the order didn’t come. It is still too close to call. In the last few days, the shelling of Donbas by the Kiev regime has actually intensified. Kiev troops have moved forward to the frontline separating the regime-controlled areas and free Donbas, and they brought with them more of their heavy weaponry. In Donbas, people are in a wretched mood: they feel abandoned by Russia, or rather have returned to the same hell of intermittent shelling they have lived with for years. They haven’t been allowed to join the Russian Federation as they had hoped. In Kiev, they think Putin blinked first. So say the Brits. Prudent Putin does not want war, but he may still get it. What we have now feels like a lull rather than a stable situation.

Europe Defender, one of the largest US Army-led military exercises in decades has kicked off and will run until June. The Russian Defence Minister Mr. Shoygu called upon his troops to stand ready to respond to any “adverse developments” during the NATO exercises; heavy weapons will remain in forward positions, so troop deployment could be fast. In May, Royal Navy ships will pass the Bosporus, while the Russians have moved their missile boats from the Caspian and Baltic Seas to the Black Sea. So there are still plenty of chances for things to go wrong.

Russia’s relations with the US and its minions are as bad they ever were. As bad as in 1962, during the Caribbean crisis? No, but as bad as in 1952, during the Korean War. The United States is an enemy, declared Deputy Foreign Minister Mr. Ryabkov, and such a word has not been used since the Korean War. The US and Britain called Russia their most dangerous enemy, too. Until recently, Putin still believed in the possibility of integrating Russia into the Western world, not as top dog but as a powerful state on a par with Germany or France. The years that have passed have proved to him that this was an impossible pipe dream. He has had to adjust his goals. And besides, the world has changed. There has been a tectonic shift: Russia became stronger; the US antagonised China; the American people are restive and unhappy; Europeans are prisoners in their own homes. In such a world, Russia can’t possibly take US proxy assaults lying down forever.

Relations between Russia and the US have shifted from ‘rivalry’ to ‘confrontation’ and are back to a Cold War level, wrote ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s number 2 man, who has been considered a more Western-friendly member of the Kremlin team. Russia has sent the US Ambassador back home ‘for consultations’; he tried to disobey with “Hell, no, I won’t goâ€� but eventually relented and departed to Washington, together with ten expelled US diplomats. Russians also forbade the US Embassy from hiring local staff, receiving visiting diplomats and travelling freely in Russia, making diplomatic ties rather strained.

During this time, the plot to assassinate President Lukashenko and/or kidnap his sons was uncovered in Moscow. The plotters enjoyed CIA support, said the Belarusian president, asserting that his assassination had been authorised at the highest level of the Biden administration. This disclosure drew Belarus closer to Moscow. A year ago Minsk and Moscow were cold-shouldering each other. Lukashenko had good reason to suspect that the Russian oligarchs were involved in the colour revolution in his country. They hoped to remove the stubborn president, then privatise and buy Belarus’ industry, as this republic is the only one that preserved and improved the legacy it inherited from Soviet days. Since then, Lukashenko realised that Putin is not against him and relations have begun to improve.

Bearing that in mind, people waited somewhat nervously for Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address on April 21, expecting some dramatic announcement, be it war, or the integration of Belarus, or recognition of Donbas; however the address mainly dealt with state help to families with children. Putin played Santa Claus: he congratulated the Russian people on almost beating the pandemic; now we have to be fruitful and multiply, he implied. He also gave Russians ten days of paid holiday starting May 1^st, presumably for multiplying at leisure in their summer houses. Practically every established Russian city-dwelling family has a country house for exactly such purposes. This year, Russian Easter Sunday will come on May 2^nd, so Russians will get the whole Octave of Easter as a fully paid holiday. The state will cover half of children’s summer vacation costs and give a decent lump sum to each child in time for the next school year, enough to buy proper clothes and books. Holidaying in Russia will be subsidised for all, to offset the difficulty of travelling abroad due to corona restrictions. For those who insist on going abroad, Egypt will be soon be open as a holiday destination.

Such generosity has Russians worried. It reminded them of those restful hours and the shot of vodka their fathers were given before being sent to attack the German lines – a respite before battle. However, Putin didn’t mention the Kiev regime and the Ukraine even once.

He promised severe retribution to whoever crosses red lines, and compared the Czechs and Poles with “Tabaqui [the Jackal] hanging around [the man-eating tiger] Shere Khan, howling to appease their sovereign”. Shere Khan is certainly the US, the great enemy of Mowgli [Russia], the human child in the jungle. Rudyard Kipling has been cancelled in the US for his White Man’s Burden, and Tabaqui did not appear in the US cinematic versions of the Jungle Book, but Russians know the character as it appears in their cartoon version.

The Czech jackals have occasioned much mirth among Russians by claiming that their arms depot was blown up in 2014 by Petrov and Boshirov, the legendary GRU agents of Skripal fame. Hundreds of memes appeared right away, appealing to the Russian sense of humour.