RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/is_virus_information_from_china_russia_and_iran_too_corrupt_to_be_useful.html

There are reports from China suggesting that the government is lying about having coronavirus under control. Russia’s statistics are so low as to be suspect. And Iran is manifestly lying about its coronavirus data. Is this misinformation affecting the West’s ability to understand the virus and control its spread?

China has boasted that, thanks to its swift reaction, it has managed to stop all new coronavirus infections. (For now, please ignore China’s initial cover-up, which let a plague loose upon the world.) By March 19, both the New York Times and the Washington Post accepted without question China’s report that it had no new coronavirus infections.

Doctors still at work within China, though, were less sanguine:

Report by @appledaily_hk , Japanese news outlet interviewed Wuhan doctors, and confirmed Wuhan has stopped testing, that is why new case = 0 there. They release people in quarantine early too.

China is not alone in publishing suspect information. Russia, which Putin controls with an iron fist, has also touted its success with coronavirus, claiming that it’s tested over 133,000 people and identified only 367 cases, with only one death. Some experts find baffling Russia’s immunity to the disease, given that it shares a long border with China and has over 144 million people.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/04/06/vladimir-putins-encirclement-of-europe/#slide-1

‘Strategic autonomy’ will be insufficient to the challenge

Russian propaganda, going back to czarist and Soviet times, often claims that Western powers are encircling Russia, forcing Moscow to be belligerent against its wishes. Russia is the perennial victim of aggressive foreign powers trying to keep Moscow locked in the steppes and, in the worst case, to install themselves in the Kremlin. Undoubtedly, Russia has been invaded repeatedly in the past: Mongol hordes, Napoleon, and Hitler all tried to extend their power over it. But now claims of a potential repetition of such invasions by Russia’s Western neighbors ring hollow. Neither Europe nor the United States has any interest in controlling Russian lands. On the contrary, it is Russia that has managed to extend its reach along a front from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and is projecting power to the Arctic and the Atlantic. Europe is being encircled by Russia — not the other way around.

Russia asserts that it is under siege by the West. Western antagonism, the argument goes, is evident in NATO’s addition of new members, including the latest one, Montenegro, which joined in 2017; in the U.S. and EU support for various “color revolutions” that erupted across a belt of countries from Ukraine to North Africa and the Middle East; and in the U.S.-led wars in the Middle East. In a 2019 speech, General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, accused the United States of conducting a “policy of expanding the system of military presence directly at Russia’s borders.” Such a Western policy of encirclement supposedly forces Moscow to lash out to defeat the “Trojan horse” of “color revolutions” and the various military offensives allegedly targeting Russia.