Will Poland Refurbish Israeli Patriots for Ukraine War?

In June, rumors swirled in the media that the Biden administration was holding discussions with Israel and Ukraine about the possibility of transferring aging Patriot air defense systems currently in Israel to Ukraine. The CNN reported: “The systems would likely need to be transferred to the US first, where they would undergo refurbishment, before being sent to Ukraine.”

In April, the Israel Defense Forces said it would soon “retire its Patriot systems,” as noted by The Financial Times, though the report elided over providing a valid reason for scraping the much-touted air defense system. Since then, a gag order appears to have been issued on reporting about military co-operation between Israel and Ukraine, as it is a sensitive and strictly off-limits topic.

Russian news agency Sputnik reported on August 12 that Poland had signed an agreement on the production of 48 launchers of the Patriot surface-to-air missile system, United States Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski claimed on Monday during the signing ceremony.

Under a deal worth $1.23 billion (4.7 billion zloty), the M903 launch stations will be produced at Stalowa Wola steelworks in Poland in co-operation with US defense giant Raytheon Technologies Corp. for which the US approved a $2 billion defense loan to Poland last month. The air defense systems production will run through 2027-2029.

The US has been increasingly looking to outsource production of the systems, with a joint US-Japan project hitting a stumbling block in July, the report noted, though it failed to clarify how Poland’s primitive defense production industry would produce launchers for advanced Patriot missile systems when it could hardly produce 155 mm. artillery shells that Ukraine, under the patronage of the US, had to import from a number of European and Asian countries during the two-year-long war.

Clearly, a behind-the-scenes understanding has been reached that instead of refurbishing “aging Israeli Patriot systems” in the US, the launchers would instead be transferred to Poland where they would be refurbished under the supervision of Raytheon’s technicians and then deployed in the Ukraine War.

During the two-year conflict, Israel’s thriving military-industrial complex has provided plenty of weapons, specifically its cutting-edge drone and missile technology, to Ukraine, but mainstream media, on the instructions of the US security establishment, has been especially careful not to report on the “sensitive topic.”  

Instead, Western media bent over backwards to publish misleading reports at the beginning of the Ukraine War that Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for Iron Dome missile interceptors, a risible request that Israel allegedly “contemptuously rebuffed,” after which the Zelensky regime had a fictitious spat with Israeli policymakers.

The clear objective of creating this smokescreen around clandestine military co-operation between Washington’s servile surrogates, Ukraine and Israel, was in deference to Israel’s regional security interests. Because Israel frequently mounts airstrikes on Iran-backed militant groups in Lebanon and Syria, whereas Russia has deployed troops, aircraft and S-400 air defense system at Syria’s Mediterranean coast. If Russia gets even an inkling of Israel’s military assistance to Ukraine, then Israel would have to rethink its belligerent attitude.

Nonetheless, besides pledging to refurbish Israeli Patriot missile launchers for Ukraine, Poland also inked a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine on July 8. Among other substantial commitments, the security agreement signed in Warsaw provided for the development of a mechanism for Poland to shoot down Russian missiles and drones fired in the direction of Poland in Ukrainian airspace, which would legally amount to an unequivocal declaration of war between a NATO member state, Poland, and Russia.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky during a joint press conference with Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk stated: “We are especially grateful for the special arrangements, and this is reflected in the security agreement. It provides for the development of a mechanism to shoot down [by Poland] Russian missiles and drones fired in the airspace of Ukraine in the direction of Poland. I am confident that our teams and the teams of the ministries of defense, together with our military, will work together to work out how we can quickly implement this point of our agreements.”

The vendetta between Russia and Poland, clearly punching above its weight, goes a long way back. In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15, 2022, weeks after Russia’s intervention in February.

The “Three Musketeers” took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives, as such, because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.

Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of the Zelensky regime, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—then the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belonged and the infamous “puppet master” who hired and fired government executives and ministers on a whim.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of late President Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.

Subsequent Polish and international investigations led by independent observers conclusively determined that the crash-landing was an accident caused by fog and pilot error. Still, Kaczynski had long suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking the accident, and was harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.

The Polish electorate dispensed poetic justice to kingmaker Kaczynski as he was ousted from power following the October 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland due to his myopic and vindictive policies and Donald Tusk was elected prime minister of the coalition government.

Tusk is a seasoned politician and diplomat who was the President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. It was expected of him to display statesmanship and revisit the confrontational approach of his predecessors. But clearly, he is going down the same path of perdition that proved fatal not only for egocentric and spiteful politicians but for the Poles as a nation.

Was Nord Stream Sabotaged with Germany’s Approval?

On August 14, German public broadcaster ARD, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit claimed in a joint report that federal prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant in June against a Ukrainian diving instructor believed to have resided until recently in Poland. The reports identified the alleged saboteur as Volodymyr Z.

The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed it had received a German arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man. It said it received the warrant in June, but the suspect left for Ukraine a month before. The prosecutor’s office offered a lame excuse that the authorities failed to prevent him from leaving because the relevant information had not percolated down to the country’s border guard.

Clearly, there was a collusion between German and American establishment media, because the very next day, on August 15, The Wall Street Journal published a bizarre scoop, claiming the Nord Stream gas pipelines, providing Russian natural gas to European countries before the war, were blown up by a six-member Ukrainian sabotage team of skilled deep-sea divers in an operation that was initially approved by Vladimir Zelensky and then called off, but which went ahead anyway.

German reports, published only a day before the WSJ scoop, were evidently meant to create a media hype and lend credence to an otherwise asinine report, clearly meant to tarnish the reputation of Ukraine’s former top military commander, who was sacked in February for defying Washington’s diktats of committing more cannon fodder for Ukraine’s much-touted albeit easily foiled counteroffensive last year, while simultaneously attempting to exonerate Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

The WSJ report claims the subversive operation was allegedly directed by a serving army general, who reported to Ukraine’s then commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny. Zelensky initially approved the plan, but later backtracked after the CIA found out about it and asked Kyiv to call it off. Nonetheless, Zaluzhny pressed ahead with the mission, claiming once dispatched, a sabotage team goes incommunicado and cannot be withdrawn.

Nord Stream pipelines were ruptured by blasts under the Baltic Sea in September 2022. Early the following year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh conclusively proved with irrefutable facts and incontrovertible evidence that explosives were planted on the Nord Stream pipelines by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise, and detonated on orders from Washington in order to wean Germany off Russian energy amidst the Ukraine War.

Seymour Hersh, however, elided over the obvious fact that the sabotage operation was tacitly approved by the German government. For a heavily industrialized nation like Germany, energy security is the lifeline of economy dependent on industrial production. Hence, how is it possible that a six-member team of amateur divers, as claimed by WSJ, or professional US Navy divers, as stated by Hersh, blew up one of the world’s largest natural gas pipeline network without the knowledge of German maritime security forces?

Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, German political establishment, under tremendous pressure from Washington, was itself looking for a pretext to stop importing natural gas from Russia. But violating the international contract was a controversial issue because East Germany, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was in the Soviet sphere of influence, has a significant political constituency that shares historical and cultural ties with Russia, and favored cordial relations and energy reliance on Russia despite the war.

The US security establishment, however, persuaded the Scholz government behind the scenes that its notorious saboteurs would do the dirty work and Germany would simply have to acquiesce or maybe point fingers at banana republics like Poland and Ukraine for orchestrating the Nord Stream sabotage.

Despite being an industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany might have been a sovereign state at liberty to pursue independent foreign policy during the reign of the Third Reich, but since the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, it has become a virtual colony of the imperial United States, where 50,000 US troops are currently deployed in sprawling Ramstein Air Base and several other military bases.

After the United States, Germany is one of the largest contributors of military assistance to Ukraine, and has provided billions of dollars economic aid during the course of two years. During Ukraine’s Kursk incursion inside Russia, besides British Challenger battle tanks, German Marder infantry vehicles, donated by Berlin to Kyiv, took the lead in mounting the assault.

Ukrainian conscripts and pilots are being trained by German and American military personnel at military bases in Germany. It’s ironic that Germany still claims to be the torchbearer of pacifism and idealism while simultaneously pandering to Washington’s diktats and adding fuel to the fire in the Ukraine War.

Immediately following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced plans in April 2022 to spend an additional €2 billion ($2.16 billion) on military needs, most of which was aimed at providing weapons to Ukraine. Scholz also pledged €100 billion ($112.7 billion) of the 2022 budget for the German armed forces and committed to reaching the target of 2% of GDP spending on defense that was requested by NATO.

In addition, German government announced financial support allowing Kyiv to directly buy tanks from German defense companies like Rheinmetall. Germany specifically provided substantial number of Marder light tanks, armored vehicles equipped with anti-tank missiles, to Ukraine that are now being deployed by Ukraine’s forces in the Kursk battlefield inside Russia. Berlin similarly provided heavy-combat Leopard tanks to Ukraine, though in smaller number.

Despite desperate German attempts to assuage American patrons, a diplomatic furor erupted in May 2021 after it was revealed the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a partnership with Denmark's foreign intelligence unit to spy on senior European officials, including then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. European diplomats complained that it was “grotesque and unacceptable” that friendly intelligence services were keeping tabs on allies, even though Washington’s policy toward servile client states has always been “trust but verify.”

The Wall Street Journal, the official mouthpiece of establishment Republicans, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that has taken the lead in publishing insider scoops during the four-year tenure of the Biden admin while the Democratic shills, the New York Times and Washington Post, took a backseat out of deference for self-styled “progressives” in the White House, has a history of publishing fabricated reports.

In the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal published a misleading report in April 2022 that German chancellor Olaf Scholz had offered Volodymyr Zelensky a chance for peace days before the launch of the Russian military offensive, but the Ukrainian president turned it down.

Then newly elected German chancellor told Zelensky in Munich on February 19, days before the Russian invasion, “that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia,” the Journal revealed. The newspaper also claimed that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.”

However, Zelensky rejected the offer to make the concession and avoid confrontation, saying that “Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

While making the preposterous allegation that the intransigent Ukrainian leadership vetoed NATO’s “flexible and conciliatory approach” to peacefully settle the dispute in order to exonerate the transatlantic military alliance for its confrontational approach toward Russia since the inception in 1949, the Journal report conveniently overlooked the crucial fact that in November 2021, the US and Ukraine had already signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership.

The agreement unequivocally confirmed “Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO” and “rejected the Crimean decision to re-unify with Russia” following the 2014 Maidan coup. Then in December 2021, Russia, in the last-ditch effort to peacefully resolve the dispute, proposed a peace treaty with the US and NATO.

The central Russian proposal was a written agreement assuring that Ukraine would not join the NATO military alliance and, in return, Russia would drawdown its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders. After the proposed treaty was contemptuously rebuffed by Washington, it appeared the die was cast for Russia’s inevitable invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

How Israel Targeted Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh in Missile Strike?

In Gaza, the Biden admin has simultaneously played the role of arsonist and the firefighter. Last October, the US sent aircraft-carriers and nuclear submarines in support of Israel and provided military assistance to the tune of billions of dollars, including bombs, missiles and aircraft, to slaughter hapless Palestinians.

But at the same time, the Democratic administration built a shoddy pier to let humanitarian aid flow, and persuaded Netanyahu to let the Biden admin at least create optics of being a neutral arbiter while it is the main enabler of Zionists’ genocide of unarmed Palestinians.

As far as Israel’s merciless carpet bombing of Gaza is concerned, this isn’t even a war but downright genocide of Palestinians, because a war is between two comparable armies, whereas in the Gaza Holocaust, a regional power backed by the world’s most powerful military force is committing ethnic cleansing of hapless Palestinians.

Incidentally, the death toll of the savage slaughter is grossly understated by mainstream media for ulterior motives. 38,000 is just the number of dead bodies counted by aid workers, whereas the exact death toll is well above 100,000, as most dead bodies are still buried beneath the rubble of Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah and would take months, if not years, to recover after the rubble is cleared. A Lancet study recently estimated the Gaza death toll could exceed 186,000.

Besides the Biden admin’s reluctance to start another devastating Middle East war in the election year, another reason the American deep state is also hesitant to greenlight Israel’s ground invasion of Hezbollah’s bastion southern Lebanon is that all the military resources of the Pentagon are currently being consumed by the protracted proxy war in east Ukraine.

Moreover, the Biden admin is also concerned that mounting a military offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon might provoke Iran to mount retaliatory missile and drone strikes on critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, such as the Abqaiq oil installation attack in September 2019, thus disrupting global energy supply in the election year and eliminating the Democrats chances of winning the elections.

However, Israel’s opportunistic policymakers are yearning to draw Iran into Gaza War, thus creating a pretext for the expansion of the war in southern Lebanon in order to cash the opportunity to dismantle the Iran-Hezbollah nexus once and for all, posing a security threat to Israel’s northern borders.

Even though by mainstream media’s own accounts the Shiite leadership of Iran and Hezbollah weren’t even aware of Sunni Palestinian liberation movement Hamas’ October 7 assault. It’s worth pointing out that Hamas’ main patrons are private donors in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Egypt, not Iran, as frequently alleged by the mainstream disinformation campaign. In fact, Hamas as a political movement is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

It has been the longstanding geostrategic objective of IDF to dismantle the Iran-Hezbollah nexus for which the Obama admin fought Syria’s decade-long proxy war since 2011. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of IRGC’s Quds Force, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

But with the help of Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients, including Israel.

Notwithstanding, while craven Arab petro-sheikhs, under the thumb of duplicitous American masters enabling the Zionist regime’s atrocious genocide of unarmed Palestinians, were squabbling over when would be the opportune moment to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic and trade ties, the Iran-led resistance axis, comprising Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, has claimed stellar victories in the battlefield against Israel.

As far as Israel’s airstrike at Iran’s consulate in Damascus on April 1 is concerned, killing two top commanders of the IRGC, it is the declared state policy of the Zionist regime of medieval assassins to use deception and subterfuge in order to eliminate formidable adversaries if it lacks the courage to cross swords with them in the battlefield.

It’s worth noting that a tip-off from Mossad led to the cowardly assassination of Iran’s celebrated warrior Haj Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, after Haj Soleimani gave the Zionist regime and its American patrons a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.

Nonetheless, after the consulate airstrike, Iran retaliated by mounting the first-ever direct airstrike on Israel with over 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles on April 13. The airstrike was codenamed Operation True Promise, or Vada-e-Sadiq in Persian.

In response, Israel vowed to avenge the direct Iranian airstrike on its territory. Immediately afterwards, on April 19, Israeli F-15s reportedly launched Blue Sparrow ballistic target missiles at Isfahan’s military sites from Iraq’s airspace that destroyed the radar system of S-300 air defense battery at a military airport in Isfahan.

But the retaliatory strike failed to assuage the murderous frenzy of Israel’s military hawks who vowed to teach Iran a memorable lesson for punching above its weight. On the fateful day of May 19, Iran’s charismatic and eloquent President Ebrahim Raisi was due to inaugurate a hydroelectric dam in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, alongside Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

After the inauguration of the dam, President Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian boarded a helicopter that was part of a convoy of three helicopters that departed for Tabriz. But the helicopter “mysteriously crashed” in the mountainous region of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, killing all eight people onboard.

Despite repeated provocations, Iran displayed maximum restraint, held free and fair elections after the death of President Raisi in which a moderate and reformist medical doctor of mixed Azeri and Kurdish origins Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian was elected president, which speaks volumes about inclusive nature of Iran’s democratic political system in sharp contrast with autocratic Arab kingdoms.

On July 31, Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh attended the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hours later, he was reported killed in an “Israeli strike” along with his bodyguard in Tehran. Simultaneously, Israel claimed it had killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and that its intelligence had confirmed that another top Hamas leader Mohammed Deif was also killed in a July 13 Israeli strike in Khan Younis, Gaza.

Although a few news outlets reported Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack, it’s nearly impossible. Because the Hamas leader was a state guest and his residence in Tehran was in the high security zone.

The most plausible scenario is that Israel deployed the same modus operandi for killing Ismail Haniyeh that it had previously used for destroying the radar system of S-300 air defense battery at a military airport in Isfahan on April 19. Israeli F-15 aircraft launched a missile at the Hamas leader’s residence in Tehran from Iraq’s airspace.

In August, the mouthpiece of US security establishment NY Times published a dubious report that Haniyeh was killed by a bomb Israel planted at state guest house in Tehran two months ago.

Clearly, this was a vain attempt by establishment media to absolve Israel from violating international law by mounting a missile strike on a sovereign state and diverting the blame instead on its regional proxies, specifically Mujahideen-e-Khalq, for allegedly planting the bomb.

But there are several major lacunas in the preposterous report. Firstly, Hamas chief was on Mossad’s kill list since October, therefore all political and military leaders of the organization are immensely cautious about their security and they never use the same accommodation or mode of transport in their visits abroad.

Secondly, Hamas has already officially acknowledged that Haniyeh was martyred in a missile strike on a secure building regularly combed with bomb detectors in which he was staying in for the duration of the visit and about which only a handful people knew. For obvious reasons, the statement of Hamas officials carries far more weight than malicious disinformation peddled by prejudiced Zionist news outlet owned by Jewish Sulzberger family.

The significance of Ismail Haniyeh in the Palestinian liberation movement can be gauged from the gracious gesture that his funeral prayers were led by Iran’s reclusive supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei who rarely ventures out in public.

Ismail Haniyeh wasn’t even a military leader. He was a gifted politician and a skilled statesman who vociferously championed the Palestine cause throughout his life. For his lifelong mission, he paid the agonizing price of sacrificing three sons, many members of his extended family and eventually his own life. Being a pacifist political leader, Haniyeh was one of the most vocal proponents of ceasefire and peace in the region. The ten-month-long conflict in Gaza is only going to escalate after his treacherous assassination, which is the likely goal of the blood-thirsty Zionist regime.

Nuclear Brinkmanship: NATO’s Strategy in Ukraine War

The US military brass, through NATO’s integrated military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely expendable pawns beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon.

The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, which alongside China, is deemed an existential threat to US security interests, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being sacrificed as cannon fodder.

Although China, too, matches the conventional warfare capabilities of the Cold War-era arch-rivals, its relatively modest nuclear arsenal and delivery systems, long-range ballistic missile program, aren’t in the same “super power league” yet.

China could increase its nuclear stockpile to 1,500 by 2035, according to State Dept. report, but current estimates put China’s arsenal at about 500 warheads. In comparison, the US has 5,748 warheads, whereas Russia has 5,580 warheads. Russia has 1,549 nuclear warheads that are deployed, while the US has deployed 1,419. Because the New START treaty caps the deployment of warheads at 1,550.

Besides being the world’s leading nuclear power alongside the US, Russia also boasts cutting-edge delivery mechanisms that are enough to give goosebumps to envious adversaries plotting to degrade the Eurasian behemoth’s military capabilities.

Pioneering the hypersonic missile technology that can evade the most advanced missile defense systems, Russia has recently unveiled an array of state-of-the-art armaments that can make any military technology aficionado become an avid admirer of Russia’s techno-scientific expertise.

The Kinzhal, or The Dagger, is an air-launched ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers. Currently launched from a MiG-31 fighter, the missile accelerates to speeds between Mach 4 and Mach 10 while performing evasive maneuvers to circumvent air and missile defenses.

The Tsirkon, or Zircon, is a ship-launched hypersonic cruise missile capable of reaching Mach 9 speed to strike ground or naval targets at a range of approximately 1,000 kilometers. The Iskander is a mobile short-range ballistic missile system, traveling at a terminal hypersonic speed of 2,100–2,600 meters per second (Mach 6.2 – Mach 7.6) and can reach an altitude of 50 kilometers and has a range of up to 500 kilometers.

The most fearsome weapon in the Russian arsenal, though, is the doomsday intercontinental ballistic missile named The Sarmat and colloquially referred to as Satan II with an operational range of 18,000 km., and capable of carrying 16 thermonuclear multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.

Notwithstanding, in the heyday of the Cold War in the sixties when 400,000 US forces were deployed in Europe that were still outnumbered by Soviet troops, the Soviet leadership made repeated requests for signing a “no first use” nuclear treaty precluding the likelihood of pre-emptive nuclear strike, but the United States balked at the proposal due to conventional warfare superiority of the USSR in Europe.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev even unilaterally pledged against the first use of nuclear weapons in 1982, though Russia has since dropped the pledge in 1993 following the break-up of the Soviet Union and consequent tilting of balance of power in favor of the United States.

After European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War, NATO now holds conventional warfare superiority over Russia with a significantly larger number of ground troops and combat aircraft.

NATO’s central rationale in engaging Russia in a protracted war of attrition in Ukraine since the Maidan coup toppling Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 is to sufficiently degrade Russia’s conventional warfare capabilities in order to coerce Kremlin to abandon its formidable nuclear arsenal in return for economic inducements, as the transatlantic military alliance did to several East European client states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the nineties by incorporating them into NATO and the European Union, in order to claim the crown of being world’s sole super power, worshipped by all and accountable to none.

Despite comparable nuclear deterrence, as succinctly explained in the foregoing paragraphs, NATO clearly has an advantage over Russia in terms of conventional warfare capabilities. Because defense production industries of heavily industrialized NATO member states, including the US, Britain, France, Germany and even Turkey, can produce infinite quantities of armaments and ammunition over the years, which would be donated free of cost to Ukrainian proxy, whereas Russia’s military-industrial complex obviously has limited capacity, particularly after exclusion of Russia from international financial system and the imposition of economic sanctions by neocolonial powers.

In addition to state-of-the-art weapons arsenal, manpower would also play a significant role in Ukraine’s protracted war of attrition. It’s noteworthy that Ukraine is simply the name of the battlefield, while the war is actually being fought between Russia, on the one hand, and NATO military alliance, on the other.

Western regimes treat Ukraine’s largely conscript army as merely cannon fodder. Besides, thousands of mercenaries on NATO’s payroll, particularly from Poland, Georgia and rest of impoverished East European states, have also been fighting for Ukraine for the last two years. Whereas Russian armed forces are comprised of citizens whose lives matter not only to their families but also to Russian state.

For these reasons, Machiavellian military strategists of NATO are resorting to nuclear brinkmanship. The US military brass, leading NATO’s integrated military command, would keep providing abundant quantities of conventional armaments to Ukrainian troops not only to battle Russian forces in Donbas but also to target Russia’s border regions, such as Kursk and Belgorod, while keeping the intensity of hostilities below the threshold where Russia might consider mounting a direct attack at NATO territory or deploying strategic nuclear weapons as a method of last resort.

Despite feigned rhetoric of pacifism and ostensibly being a “defensive alliance,” NATO has adopted a suicidally perilous and aggressive course in the Ukraine War. Because operational miscalculations could lead to the nightmare scenario of a nuclear war, which would be catastrophic not only for belligerents but for the rest of the world too.

Biden’s Lame Duck Presidency and Deep State Ascendancy

Top commander of the US Armed Forces Gen. Charles Q. Brown in his swashbuckling Air Force uniform appeared before Ukraine Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Joe Wilson at a hearing in April. In response to a polite query, Gen. Brown majestically replied: “As we bring on the F-16s, it’s not only the airplanes, but the training of the pilots, the training of the maintainers — but also making sure we have the weapons to go with it. That is the dialogue we’re having, not only to get the airplanes but to get them to full capability.”

On August 15, The Politico Magazine reported the Biden admin was “open to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine.” The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) has a range of over 230 miles and would become the longest-range weapon the US sends Ukraine, “if it goes ahead with the delivery,” which is a needless caveat as it is already a done deal.

On August 12, The New York Times revealed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a recent phone call with Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant, had ordered the deployment of a nuclear submarine to the Middle East, following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 and consequent imminent threat of Iranian reprisal attack against Israel.

Early this month, on August 2, Lloyd Austin, in his capacity as the Secretary of Defense and the liaison between civilian administration and the US military brass, revoked plea deals agreed to the week before with the men accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices, who are held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The prosecutor had earlier agreed to plea deals that the men would plead guilty in exchange for receiving a life sentence rather than the death penalty. In addition, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements," Austin wrote in a tersely worded memo.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It all happened in early June after Russian President Putin made a surprise announcement that a Russian naval fleet would make a port call to Cuba amidst Ukraine’s proxy war as a show of force.

Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a forceful response to Russia’s provocation but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Consequently, the Biden presidency has been reduced to the “lame duck” status and the rogue super power is being ruled directly by the deep state, at least in the domain of formulation of national security and defense policies, until the inauguration of the next president, as is evident from the foregoing instances of security establishment’s encroachment on the civilian administration’s domain.

Two weeks following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted on March 11, 2022: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from “certain quarters” to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was making the right decision.

Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.

The Intercept reported in March 2022 that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.

In April 2021, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit in June 2021. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

Days before Biden’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2021, instigating Russian dissident and Putin’s deceased foe Alexei Navalny to return to Russia on January 17 from his sojourn in Germany for no apparent political advantage after being allegedly poisoned in August 2020 was clearly the job of the US deep state that plotted to sabotage newly inaugurated Biden admin’s relations with Russia and forestall the likelihood of rapprochement between the arch-rivals.

As previously mentioned that as a goodwill gesture before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva in June 2021, Russia significantly drawdown its troop build-up along Ukraine’s border. Ironically, reciprocating “the courtesy,” however, the ambience and body language of the summit, clearly choreographed by the US national security establishment, were kept as austere and unfriendly as possible.

No joint press conferences were held, as is customary after such momentous summits. The organizers of the farcical show strictly ordered “no breaking the bread” or refreshments during hours-long strenuous discussions. All blame games and tough talk. Even Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was held in a more cordial atmosphere than the bitter encounter between the leaders of the two global powers.

The civilian administrations of the United States, whether Republican or Democratic, are always inclined to have cordial relations with other major powers, including Russia and China, and prefer instead to focus on national economy to provide much-needed financial relief to the electorate. But the mindset and institutional logic of the US deep state has been frozen in the Cold War era, and it perceives any threat to its global military domination agenda with utmost suspicion and hostility.

Biden’s Fall from Grace and Ukraine War Escalation

On August 6, Ukrainian forces, numbering several thousand and backed by German Marder infantry fighting vehicles, advanced 10 km. across the border into Russia’s Kursk region. Previous incursions from Ukraine into Russia, near the city of Belgorod, were led by neo-Nazi militias and foreign mercenaries. But this time, the incursion was reportedly conducted by Ukrainian forces, using a combination of infantry, armor, drones, electronic warfare and air defense in the attack.

The main operational Russian gas pipeline into Europe runs near Sudzha, where a metering station – reportedly captured by Ukraine – monitors the reduced Russian supplies to countries such as Austria and Hungary. Russia has declared a state of emergency in Kursk and acting regional governor Aleksey Smirnov revealed on Monday, August 12, that over a hundred thousand civilians had been evacuated following an attack that has clearly caught Moscow off guard.

A visibly angry Vladimir Putin convened a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council on August 7, in which the military’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, told him the advance had been halted and that the Kursk operation would be concluded by “reaching the Russian state border.”

Putin was exasperated for a reason, because only a week ago on August 1, he had displayed tremendous magnanimity and extended a goodwill gesture to the Biden admin by agreeing to a prisoner swap deal, but instead of rapprochement, Washington paid him back by instructing Ukrainian proxy forces to mount the Kursk incursion inside Russia.

The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on August 1, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free. Releasing Western hostages was clearly an effort by Kremlin to appease Washington after the naval standoff in Cuba in June.

On June 12, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.

U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the "capable and deployable" nature of the Canadian military.

The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to a nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It seems quite “a coincidence” that only a day before Russian naval fleet made a port call to Havana and six weeks before Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, his cocaine addicted son Hunter was found guilty by a Delaware jury on June 11 for owning a gun as a user of illegal drugs and lying on paperwork about his drug use when he bought the gun.

Hunter Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is likely to receive a lesser sentence. In addition, Hunter also faces federal criminal charges for failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.

What’s even more surprising is the fact that Hunter Biden nearly avoided facing trials on both the gun charges and the tax charges. Last year, prosecutor’s office and Hunter Biden’s legal team struck a tentative plea deal in which Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and submitted to drug testing and other monitoring. Under the deal, prosecutors would have deferred the gun charges and eventually dropped them if Hunter had remained out of trouble.

But the deal “miraculously” fell apart in June after the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced by a security establishment’s stooge, Kamala Harris. Thus, Joe Biden was literally blackmailed by the deep state to quit the presidential race in exchange for saving the life of his problem child.

Had Joe Biden decided not to quit the race, the security establishment threatened to open host of other criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including the notorious Burisma Holdings case in which Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars in illicit kickbacks from a Ukrainian energy firm from 2013 to 2018 while his father Joe Biden was Obama admin’s vice president.

On the other hand, security establishment through Democratic emissaries assured Joe Biden to use its influence with security agencies, bureaucracy and judiciary to drop all criminal cases against Hunter if Joe Biden agreed to quit the race and kept quiet afterwards.

Kamala Harris, being an Indian immigrant and lacking a significant political constituency in the United States, is an ideal presidential candidate from the perspective of security establishment. During her four-year unremarkable career as vice president and the way she cheered waving Ukrainian flag during President Zelensky’s address to the US Congress, she has proved that she would play into the hands of deep state like a servile puppet.

Furthermore, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, meant as a psy-ops tactic, served a two-fold objective. Firstly, it created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, restricted Trump’s movement during the election campaign, as he has since been advised by the Secret Service not to attend outdoor rallies and conveyed a message that red lines shouldn’t be crossed in political speeches. It should be noted, though, the assassination attempt was merely a shot across the bow, meant to petrify rather than kill Trump.

Secondly, the drastic measure also managed to send a spine-chilling warning to Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting US presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Joe Biden decided a week after Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House for his Delaware mansion instead of ending up in the morgue.

Since the World War II, the United States has been ruled by the top brass of the Pentagon while presidents have been reduced to the ceremonial role of being public relations’ representatives of the deep state, pontificating and sermonizing like priests to gullible audiences at home and abroad on the virtues of supposed American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.

But in military oligarchy’s perpetual conflict with major world powers deemed existential threats to the US security interests, such as arch-rivals Russia and China, as in the Ukraine War, civilian presidents, whether Biden or Trump, don’t have the authority to overrule the global domination agenda of the Pentagon.

All the militaries of the 32 NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is subordinate to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The incumbent Godfather of the Cosa Nostra is Gen. Charles Q. Brown since October 2023 following the retirement of Gen. Mark Milley who completed his tenure of four tumultuous years, including the Ukraine War and the Capitol riots, in September as the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Thus, the Pentagon’s top brass, through NATO’s military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely servile stooges beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon. The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being used as cannon fodder.

In February, Ukrainian President Zelensky sacked Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces on the whim of US security establishment. As he was hesitant to commit more cannon fodder to breach Russia’s defensive lines in Donbas amid much-hyped albeit easily foiled Ukrainian counteroffensive lasting from June to December last year.

In fact, the planners of the thwarted counteroffensive themselves were well aware that it was a futile effort because Ukraine’s largely conscript army was simply not a match for Russia’s professional military and superior firepower. But they kept painting the rosy picture of the battlefield for public consumption in order to oblige the Biden admin to keep providing billions of dollars military assistance to Ukraine.

Similarly, the Kursk and previous Belgorod incursions, too, are simply morale-boosting stratagems meant to create a perception that Ukrainian conscripts are capable of fighting wars when, in fact, sleazy Ukrainian politicians and military commanders are squandering lavish military aid on buying opulent villas in southern France and spending the nights gambling away millions of dollars in swanky casinos of Monte Carlo.

Nonetheless, differences between Zelensky and Zaluzhny had been simmering for many months but appeared to grow wider towards the end of last year, after Zaluzhny said the war had reached a stalemate in a long essay and interview in The Economist magazine in November.

New commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has been criticized for pursuing bloody and reckless military tactics which resulted in significant Ukrainian losses during the Battle of Bakhmut, and was nicknamed “General 200,” a reference to Cargo 200, a Soviet military code denoting military fatalities.

He would likely retain his job as long he uncritically obeys Washington’s dictates. But if he made the mistake of developing critical faculties, a cardinal sin in military command structure across the world, then he too would meet the same ignominious fate that befell his wretched predecessor.

The Kursk incursion is clearly the handiwork of Oleksandr Syrskyi, a reckless military commander beholden to American masters, because it serves no strategic objective, as even mainstream media reports have acknowledged that holding on to Russian territory is next to impossible.

The only plausible rationale that Syrskyi decided to place more Ukrainian “cannon fodder” in the line of fire was to pander to the dictates of Washington, which has been excoriating Ukraine’s military commanders to show tangible battlefield achievements since the much-hyped counteroffensive was easily thwarted last year in order to keep receiving billions of dollars in military assistance.

But Russian positions in heavily fortified Donbas region were so impregnable that Ukrainian troops couldn’t advance an inch further without taking significant casualties. Therefore, Syrskyi meticulously scanned the map to find an easy military target to assuage American masters. Invading even Belgorod region appeared a daunting task because Russians were prepared.

Russia shares a thousand miles border with Ukraine, and it could be breached anywhere with a surprise attack. Kremlin didn’t expect a Ukrainian military commander would be foolhardy enough to mount an incursion in poorly guarded Kursk region.

The only comprehensible objective of the Kursk incursion seems to gain international publicity for a few days before Russian reinforcements arrive and beat Ukrainian forces back across the border after taking significant casualty toll.

After the surprise Kursk incursion, even Belarus has beefed up security along Ukraine’s border because anything could be expected from Washington’s servile stooge, Gen. Syrskyi, who has scant regard for the lives of his own soldiers and clearly has careerist ambitions to go to any lengths to obey justifiable or unjustifiable orders of superiors.

Trump’s Brush with Death and Biden’s Fall from Grace

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It all happened in early June after Russian President Putin made a surprise announcement that a Russian naval fleet would make a port call to Cuba amidst Ukraine’s proxy war as a show of force.

On June 12, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.

U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the "capable and deployable" nature of the Canadian military.

The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

It seems quite “a coincidence” that six weeks before Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, his cocaine addicted son Hunter was found guilty by a Delaware jury on June 11 for owning a gun as a user of illegal drugs and lying on paperwork about his drug use when he bought the gun.

Hunter Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is likely to receive a lesser sentence. In addition, Hunter also faces federal criminal charges for failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.

What’s even more surprising is the fact that Hunter Biden nearly avoided facing trials on both the gun charges and the tax charges. Last year, prosecutor’s office and Hunter Biden’s legal team struck a tentative plea deal in which Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and submitted to drug testing and other monitoring. Under the deal, prosecutors would have deferred the gun charges and eventually dropped them if Hunter had remained out of trouble.

But the deal “miraculously” fell apart in June after the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced by a security establishment’s stooge, Kamala Harris. Thus, Joe Biden was literally blackmailed by the deep state to quit the presidential race in exchange for saving the life of his problem child.

Had Joe Biden decided not to quit the race, the security establishment threatened to open host of other criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including the notorious Burisma Holdings case in which Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars in illicit kickbacks from a Ukrainian energy firm from 2013 to 2018 while his father Joe Biden was Obama admin’s vice president.

On the other hand, security establishment via Democratic emissaries assured Biden to use its influence with judiciary to drop all criminal cases against Hunter if Joe Biden agreed to quit the race and kept quiet afterwards.

Reportedly, on the night of presidential debate with Republican contender Donald Trump on June 27, Biden’s cook, an agent of the deep state, had mixed a psychotropic drug in his food, thus he was stoned and couldn’t defend himself against Trump’s onslaught, which became an excuse for dropping out of presidential race.

Kamala Harris, being an Indian immigrant and lacking a significant political constituency in the United States, is an ideal presidential candidate from the perspective of security establishment. During her four-year unremarkable career as vice president and the way she cheered waving Ukrainian flag during President Zelensky’s address to the US Congress, she has proved that she would play into the hands of deep state like a servile puppet.

Although Biden himself is an establishment Democrat and was fully onboard with the Pentagon’s policy of arming Ukraine and waging a protracted proxy war against arch-rival Russia, being a veteran American politician, he had developed an imperious and patronizing attitude during the four-year presidency that was looked down upon by swashbuckling American generals who are accustomed to treating civilian politicians as batmen.

If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, which I’m sure she would with deep state’s unequivocal support, the security establishment’s grip on American politics would be further consolidated and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are likely to escalate.

Trump’s brush with death on July 13 was only a sequel to the macabre spectacle being orchestrated by the deep state to consolidate its power. On July 31, 2022, while al-Qaeda’s fearsome leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was standing in the balcony of a suburban Kabul house inhaling fresh morning breeze, an American drone fired a R9X Hellfire missile, also referred to as the Ninja Missile, that’s equipped with six large blades flying at high speed to crush and cut the targeted person into smithereens.

At the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks was simply “a patsy” like Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy. Although he borrowed an AR-15 rifle from his father, he only had blank bullets that make an explosive sound without firing a shot.

There was a professional sniper perched on the rooftop of a nearby building who had a rifle equipped with telescope and silencer. But his job wasn’t to shoot at Trump, as expected, but rather to shoot at participants of the rally. In fact, he did kill one person named Corey Comperatore and critically wounded two others.

The victims were intentionally shot because Trump’s powerful adversaries wanted to send a loud and clear message that they mean business and next time it would be Trump lying dead in the pool of blood, though the assassination attempt itself was merely a shot across the bow, meant to petrify rather than kill Trump.

The object that injured Trump’s right ear was actually a miniature drone, the size of a dragonfly and equipped with tiny but sharp blades, that’s developed by DARPA, though still in developmental stages and isn’t available in the market. In fact, Trump did confide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that it sounded like “the world's largest mosquito.”

Subsequently, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee on July 25 that former President Donald Trump may not have been hit with a bullet but with shrapnel or some other object.

The assassination attempt, meant as a psy-ops tactic, served a two-fold objective. Firstly, it created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, restricted Trump’s movement during the election campaign, as he has since been advised by the Secret Service not to attend outdoor rallies and conveyed a message that red lines shouldn’t be crossed in political speeches.

Secondly, the drastic measure also managed to send a spine-chilling warning to Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting US presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Joe Biden decided a week after Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House for his Delaware mansion instead of morgue.