Did China Allow Ukraine's Drone Attack on Russia?

Begun, the drone wars already did?

Why is it called Operation Spiderweb?

So people get really upset when I talk about my view that September 11th wasn’t done by Arab terrorists but by remotely-piloted planes even though isn’t that exactly what a drone is? And didn’t Predators come out just before September 11th?

What’s that old quip — the future is here but it just isn’t evenly distributed? That certainly was the vibe when Ukraine allegedly blew up a number of Russian planes a week or so ago.

Please, don’t call it Russia’s Pearl Harbor. Not only is it offensive to those of us who have family that survived Pearl Harbor but it, in fact, raises more questions.

After all, didn’t America have advance warning of Pearl Harbor? And doesn’t that raise the possibility that Russia, too, had advance warnings? Did they have advance warnings?

The satellite imagery confirms that a number of Russian planes were destroyed — thanks to my initial investment in Umbra — and indeed a map here suggests that there were attempts to destroy the bombers far, far away from the Ukrainian battlefield.

Could it be that there’s a side deal with China whereby China gives Russia drones in exchange for allowing Ukraine to destroy their nuclear bombers?

And might America actually want this deal as well? After all, isn’t a denuclearized Russia — a denuclearized world — in everyone’s interests?

Or, is it possible that China acted through its proxy, Ukraine, to take out what it perceived as a threat to its interests — Russian nuclearized bombers? That would suggest that perhaps the alliance between Russia and China isn’t as close as might be surmised from the technological cooperation.

And indeed a recent report in The New York Times seems to hint at just that tension flaring up.

In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era.

But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.”

This unit, which has not previously been disclosed, has warned that China is a serious threat to Russian security. Its officers say that Beijing is increasingly trying to recruit Russian spies and get its hands on sensitive military technology, at times by luring disaffected Russian scientists.

The intelligence officers say that China is spying on the Russian military’s operations in Ukraine to learn about Western weapons and warfare. They fear that Chinese academics are laying the groundwork to make claims on Russian territory. And they have warned that Chinese intelligence agents are carrying out espionage in the Arctic using mining firms and university research centers as cover.

You’re supposed to believe that America didn’t know about Ukraine’s plan to strike Russia. Maybe so.

You can see it this way: America totes didn’t know, pinky promise. That’s what the media has said but I very much doubt that’s true. Don’t you think our government has wired up Ukraine so much so that we know pretty much everything going?

Court Chinese stooge Noah Smith lays out that the drone conflict is really about China and China’s apparently going to be very powerful in the drone war stuff if it’s not already totally in charge. He compares drone technology to the advent of aircraft carriers.

These sure look like Chinese made drones.

How common will these attacks be in the future?

A friend of mine who works in the drone industry confirmed to me that the drones were Chinese and running Ardupilot.

He feared that if you scaled up such an attack from a ship you could paralyze virtually any coastal city.

Now there’s a more metaphysical thing here, too. Maybe the drones want to be destroying the planes in a kind of Schumpeterian destruction?

You could imagine a world in which every job that could be done with a plane or helicopter had to be done with a drone, in which insurance companies would simply make it illegal to do a job where a human could potentially be killed.

An old CIA mentor of mine has long had the view that both Putin and Zelensky are old KGB guys. “What data do we really have that they dislike one another?” he’d ask.

That neither Zelensky nor Putin really want this war to end because the war itself is about driving down the population of ethnic non-white Russians and Slavs in Ukraine. In his understanding Putin and Zelensky are partners, not adversaries.

Were I advising President Trump — hello, by the way, to the White House advisors who read this website — I’d call for both Putin and Zelensky to step down.

Or perhaps I’d boycott the talks entirely. After all neither man seems particularly interested in ending the war.