Source:
https://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index4169.htm

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February 5, 2023

Chinese Weather Balloon Meets Biden Doom Over Fears It Might Reach Ukraine

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A compelling new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today first noting State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin marking the 20^th Anniversary of the United States blatantly lying its way into illegally invading Iraq with the statement: “The United Nations should investigate Washington’s crimes against humanity…And the decision-makers should be punished for the millions of victims, refugees, broken destinies and destroyed states”, says he also most factually observed: “All policies of the United States and the collective West are based on lies”.

Among the multitude of examples of how the socialist Western colonial powers lie to themselves and others, this report notes, is the recently published American leftist media propaganda article “How The War In Ukraine Could End Sooner Than Expected”, wherein it absurdly claims: “There are predictions aplenty that Russia’s war on Ukraine will persist…But it could also end soon…Kremlin regime change, a Russian army collapse or a Ukrainian win are possible…None of these contingencies should be ruled out”—in dealing with facts and reality, though, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported this morning: “Over 130 servicemen of Ukrainian army destroyed by Russian military force in a day in the Yuzhno-Donetsk and Zaporozhye directions and over 120 Ukrainian servicemen killed in Krasny Liman area” and revealed: “In total, since the beginning of the special military operation, Russian armed forces have destroyed: 382 aircraft, 206 helicopters, 3,023 unmanned aerial vehicles, 403 anti-aircraft missile systems, 7,750 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 1,007 combat vehicles of multiple launch rocket systems, 4,003 field artillery guns and mortars, as well as 8,272 units of special military vehicles”—all of which follows former top Pentagon advisor and decorated combat tactical legend retired US Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Ph.D. this past week assessing:

The Ukrainian military force is disintegrating in front of us right now. They push people at gunpoint into uniform, and they have 400,000 casualties at least.

Russians are very methodical. They move continuously, but they don't move simultaneously on multiple axes. In other words you will not see a lightning war. What you will see in several shafts are what I call “big meat grinders”.

There are perhaps somewhere between 18 and 22 million remaining in Ukraine, out of a population of 37.5 million. 10 million are refugees, four or five million live in areas under Russian control, -where of course the people are Russian anyway, then two million work abroad in the European Union, in Great Britain. So the population is not what it used to be and 400,000 wounded is a very heavy burden for 18 to 22 million. And most of those wounded will never recover to return to the battlefield.

The Russians can launch 60,000 missiles a day. The Ukrainians can barely fire back 6,500 missiles. It is ridiculous!. We have now promised these people tanks, which will not change anything.

The Russians are winning. Ukraine is collapsing. The Russians will dismantle what's left of the Ukrainian Army and eventually hunt down Zelensky and his friends if they don't flee to Poland or somewhere else.

Over the past month while Russian “big meat grinders” continue to obliterate Ukrainians needlessly sacrificing themselves for socialist Western colonial lies, this report continues, the entire Northern Hemisphere has been struck by numerous mysterious Arctic blasts causing historic low temperatures to strike Russia, China and the United States—and to ascertain the cause of these mysterious Arctic blasts, Russia launched a Proton-M carrier rocket with an Electro-L number 4 meteorological satellite this morning, that will make it possible to receive and process multi-spectral images of cloudiness and the underlying earth's surface of the entire observable Earth disk, receive meteorological data in orbit, perform telecommunication functions in terms of distribution, exchange of hydrometeorological and cosmogeophysical data, and also relay signals from emergency beacons of the Cospas-Sarsat system.

In its bid to ascertain the cause of these mysterious Arctic blasts, this report details, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) launched a series of high-altitude weather balloons, one of which was swept off course by a massive mysterious Arctic blast that targeted the Northeast region of the United States—in quick response after this weather balloon was swept up by the mysterious Arctic blast and entered American airspace, the Chinese Foreign Ministry declared a force majeure, which notified the United States government that an extraordinary event beyond control had occurred—in its response the socialist Biden Regime and leftist media became hysterical over imaginary Chinese “spy balloons”—yesterday a US Air Force F-22 stealth fighter aircraft fired an A9X missile at the Chinese weather balloon while it was at an altitude of 58,000 feet to bring it down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina, after which Supreme Socialist Leader Joe Biden proclaimed: “I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible...They decided, without doing any damage to people on the ground...They decided that the best time to do that was when it got over water outside within a 12 mile limit”—then this morning, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China issued the statement:

China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US's use of force to attack civilian unmanned airships.

The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure, which was completely accidental.

China clearly requires the US to handle it properly in a calm, professional and restrained manner. A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense also stated that the balloon will not pose a military or personal threat to ground personnel.

Under such circumstances, the U.S. insists on using force, obviously overreacting and seriously violating international practice.

China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of relevant companies, while reserving the right to make further necessary reactions.

On Friday while the knocked off course Chinese weather balloon was traveling at a high altitude over America, this report concludes, weather experts posted the warning message: “In a little over 24 hrs it will make its way across to the Atlantic”—a warning message now joined by the satirical article “U.S. Shoots Down Spy Balloon As It Was Getting Too Close To Ukraine”, wherein it states: “The Pentagon officially went ahead with their plan to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon as it was getting too close to Ukraine's borders, sources confirmed Saturday..."We sent a strong message to China," said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin…"So long as the spy balloon stayed over America, we had peace…But the moment that spy balloon got a little too close to Ukraine - boom!...We had to take it out"”—but in the serious just published analytical article “The Chinese 'Spy Balloon' Story As Manufactured Crisis: An Alternative Reading”, sees it observing:

Previous constant headlines of the Ukraine-Russia war were put on pause Friday into Saturday as the American public's attention and discourse got temporarily consumed by the bizarre Chinese 'spy balloon' saga, which grew more dramatic by the hour until it was shot down by the Pentagon over the Atlantic Ocean.

But few are currently asking the necessary deeper questions related to the timing. Given the last major balloon crisis to take over 24/7 network news coverage ended up being a complete hoax (remember the "balloon boy" stunt of 2009 which had the world breathless and on edge for a full news cycle?), the current context to the Chinese balloon story and the question of cui bono is worth a deeper dive...

Entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand, who as a Westerner has spent many years living in China and frequently attempts to correct the often misleading analysis of mainstream press reports, offers an 'alternative view' of what's fast unfolding below…

"I took a bit of time to dissect the “spy balloon” story - both how it is portrayed in the US and China’s response", Bertrand begins a lengthy thread. “As you'll see, the more you think about it, the more stunned you get at the sheer absurdity of the whole thing".

First, the US story.

China sent a “spy balloon” over highly strategic US sites. It chose to spy on these sites with a big visible balloon (reported as being “as big as multiple school buses”), that anyone can see with the naked eye from the ground, to “demonstrate it had the capability”, despite having a plethora of other more discreet ways to spy like satellites or stealth drones.

Unclear that anyone doubted China had mastered the technology of *check notes* hot air balloons and why it therefore needed to demonstrate this capability… China chose to do so on the eve of Secretary of States Blinken’s visit to China, where he was invited, and hours after signaling Blinken would also be meeting with Xi during his visit, a high-level meeting not granted to any US Secretary of States in years.

The story therefore being that China chose to disrupt a meeting with its own president and to sabotage its own efforts at détente in the US-China conflict... The Pentagon said it had been “tracking the balloon for quite some time” and that it wasn’t the first time such an incident occurred, but this time - for unclear reasons - it chose to do a public announcement. As a result, Blinken announced he was postponing his China trip.

Now the story from the Chinese side.

To them this is a fluke accident, the balloon being “a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” that “deviated far from its planned course” because of strong “Westerlies” (wind that flows west to east) and “limited self-steering capability”, the main characteristic of a balloon being of course that it can only go up or down.

A piece in the Washington Post seems to confirm this, quoting “experts in national security and aerospace who said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting”.

“The Chinese balloon that floated 60,000 feet over the United States was described by Secretary of State Antony Blinken as a “surveillance asset.” China’s Foreign Ministry released a statement saying it was merely a weather balloon. Experts in national security and aerospace said the craft appeared to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting, telecommunications and scientific research.

In a briefing Thursday, a senior defense official declined to discuss what the Pentagon knows about the technology onboard the Chinese balloon, but said the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as revolutionary,” the official said.”

The Pentagon itself said that “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and that “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”.

I.e. the Pentagon themselves say it would make zero sense for China to use a balloon like this for intelligence purposes when it has satellites. Kind of begs the question why they decided to make a big deal out of it in the first place.

I'll let you decide for yourself which story makes more sense… The sheer ridiculousness of this Nth “red scare” episode is absolutely obvious to anyone with an iota of common sense. Except, sadly, common sense seems to be in critically short supply nowadays.

Also, as often, the real story is probably why this story became a story in the first place.

And the important context here is of course Blinken’s visit to China, which could - one can always dream - have been a step towards some form of de-escalation in China-US rapports.

It was quite easily foreseeable that a story like this one on the eve of the trip would have made it politically very difficult for Blinken to go.

[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]

https://youtu.be/6vq1r1y4Ir0

February 5, 2023 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com.
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