Chapter 3: The Second Climb

(From the article "Opinion - Why the weapon was not Russian", written for the New York Times by Nick Holentsky)

Putin is not to be trusted, but his means and motives simply don't align with the Kremenchuk detonation.

It has now been two weeks since the weapon was first deployed in central Ukraine. Yet the international community is still no closer than it was two weeks ago to uncovering the source of the attacks, if our governments are to be believed.

When pressed on the issue, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly of the UK told reporters that details were "still emerging", despite no details having been delivered to the public whatsoever. Director William J. Burns of the Central Intelligence Agency has become infamous over the last days for deflecting questions from reporters with the tact and agility of a sloth.

In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, many have naturally turned to Russia. This is of course no difficult leap to make. Putin has been struggling in Ukraine ever since the start of the war, and has made repeated threats of using nuclear weapons. His latest threat, as many point out, was almost exactly one week prior to the deployment of the weapon (or "The Ripper", as some are calling it). It's not much of a stretch to imagine the deeply unstable man resorting to a new, untested WMD, simply to cripple Ukraine's economy and stability. If this was indeed his intention, he has certainly succeeded. Owing to destroyed supply lines and a general atmosphere of terror among the populace, the Ukrainian army has been forced to retreat from key areas and defensive positions. Three days ago, they retreated from Kyiv.

This belief has become widespread, almost even uncontested, in the media since the attack. US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin told reporters on Tuesday that 'There is good reason to suspect that' ... 'the weapon was deployed by enemies of Ukraine.', and the meaning of enemies of Ukraine is not hard to decipher. Alex Jones' outbursts have been much less ambiguous, none of which I would feel comfortable quoting in this article.

However, when one actually takes a serious look at the nature of the attacks, and at the resources and motives of the Russian government, this sentiment quickly becomes much less obvious. This article will outline the reasons for my conclusion that despite what it may look like, Putin was almost certainly not behind the bombings.

First and foremost, I feel I need to address something that astute readers may already have noted from the top of this page. My name, "Holentsky". Despite what this may lead you to assume (and what some of my critics have accused), I am not Russian. I was born in a small village in Poland that was in fact so close to the Ukrainian border that many of my classmates were Ukrainian. I retain many close Ukrainian friends from those days. Though I would later move to Russia, I did so as an independent reporter, and ever since returning to the free world I have been no less vocal in my critiques of the Russian government than of the American one. I am not Russian. Let's move on.

My first reason for not suspecting the Russians is that they simply do not have the capacity to deploy a weapon like this. If you have been following the scientific community over the last weeks, you will know about the pandemonium that the weapon has been causing to physicists. Now I am no physicist, frankly I don't understand half of the things I read in science journals, but one thing has been overwhelmingly clear even to a layman like me. Within currently accepted theories, there is no mechanism that could've created the blow that this weapon landed. Whatever this weapon was, it had been utilising physics we did not previously know existed.

This must mean that somewhere, in some hidden lab, physicists have developed a new revolutionary theory of physics ahead of the rest of the scientific community combined. Additionally, they must've done so years ago. The first nuclear bomb was detonated seven years after the discovery of nuclear fission, and that was with the full funding of the US military. These scientists did with the technology of the early 2010s (or even earlier) what supercomputers are unable to do today, without any help from the outside. And all of this must've been kept under complete secrecy.

Does Russia have the capability to do this? The answer is almost certainly no. Russia spends barely half of the OECD average per university student. Despite what the large number of university graduates may suggest, Russian universities are infamous for handing out degrees with very few qualifications. In 2019, approximately 84.3 thousand Russians were enrolled in PhD equivalent programmes, compared with 282 thousand in the US. By no means do I mean to imply that Russia isn't well educated, but to have discovered and implemented a theory that most of the world has not even theorised on yet, Russia would've had to dominate the scientific community in a way that they simply do not do.

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Secondly, beyond the scientific hurdle, there is also the matter of developing a weapon of such complexity. Here, there are a number of roadblocks that Russia simply would not have been able to overcome. Firstly, the pure cost of this weapon must've been enormous. Now, knowing very little of the specifics of the weapon it's impossible to pinpoint a definitive estimate, but we can estimate the order of magnitude. As a baseline, we can take the Manhattan Project, which cost the equivalent of $30 billion in today's money, or about $7.5 billion per year of the project's running. Since 2014, Russia's military spending has remained relatively constant, hovering around $60 billion per year. This means that Russia would've had to shuffle off about 13% of its military budget into a project no one even knew existed every year for the extent of the weapon's development. And this is a very conservative estimate, as it doesn't incorporate the cost of developing such a weapon completely alone (the US was helped on the manhattan project by the Canadians, Brits, and even German Jews).

This may not seem too hard to believe at first. The US Department of Defence spends approximately 15% of the military budget every year on research. And after all, they did manage to keep the Manhattan project secret. Except they didn't. Though the exact nature of the project had been maintained a secret, the Germans, the Brits, the Canadians, the Soviets, and even the Japanese were aware that something was going on. If this weapon was known to be Russian by governments, it seems unreasonable to think that they would keep it from their people, as they would only be hindering their own anti-Russian propaganda. This forces us to conclude that, if the weapon were Russian, they would've had to divert more than $7 billion annually without leaving a single tangible trace in any financial records or resource transports for spies to pick up on. Considering that the Americans knew about the invasion of Ukraine months before it occurred, it seems nigh impossible that they would have completely missed something like this.

Thirdly and finally, at least for this article, we have the word of the Russian government itself. The day after the attack, Putin declared in no uncertain terms that Russia was not to blame for the attack and gave his deepest sympathies to its victims. Admittedly, he did then claim that the Russian government would prevent such a thing from happening again by taking control of the regions, but the point is that he didn't take credit, he did the opposite. If this were the work of the Russian government, Putin would be making a strategically disastrous move.

The point of a WMD has always been to threaten your enemies into submission, not to actually use it in war. After all, using a WMD is an invitation to have someone else use it back. This is not simply a possibility, it is for many countries an agreement. That includes the US. If the world learnt that Russia had used something far more powerful than a nuclear bomb against a NATO ally, there is a very real possibility that it would be considered a preemptive strike, in which case the US would almost certainly strike them back. Russia would essentially be relying on the very unlikely prospect that no part of the strike was ever traced back to them.

For what purpose, then, would Russia be taking this risk? Well, it's clearly not to threaten the Ukrainian people into submission, otherwise, why would they not take credit for the attacks? To sabotage the Ukrainian Army? Perhaps. But he would not be going about it very intelligently. The areas that the weapon hit do have a fair level of industrial importance for the country, but not anything such that their loss will force Ukraine to stop fighting. In terms of supply routes, there are definitely some key areas hit, especially in the south, but much of what has been destroyed simply is not militarily significant. Had the Russians really wanted to sabotage Ukrainian supply, they would've hit Kharkiv instead. Military casualties are believed to be relatively low, as the attack was far from the front lines. If anything, Putin would only have damaged the very country he seeks to annex.

I know that I won't be popular for defending the Russians, but the truth of the matter is that for all of the terrible things they have done since the start of the war, this attack is not one of them. They both do not have the resources to conduct such warfare and do not have a reason that outweighs the tremendous diplomatic risk they would be taking.

This leaves us with one natural question. If not the Russians, who? If not a mad dictator who would sacrifice millions for the sake of his own glory, who would be capable of orchestrating such a sophisticated massacre? What inhuman creature could possibly be so vile as to conduct a holocaust of such immaculate planning and execution, and of such a terrible scale?

I don't know. It is to me a mystery. To strike off a few, the Chinese would have truly nothing to gain, the Americans are too transparent to keep it secret, the Saudis would be risking the end of the war (and thus of the sanctions that have increased the price of their oil) and the North Koreans simply do not have the budget. The rest of the world will generally fit into one of these categories. A non-governmental organisation? Perhaps, but how would they have kept it secret from their government, and what could they possibly have stood to gain?

I must confess, I no longer sleep. I keep pondering this question in my head, over and over again, but no matter how hard I think, nothing makes sense. What could possibly have prompted anyone to spend this much money, this much effort, just to destroy? What sort of monster would maintain such secrecy, take on such a risk, just to kill?

If not the Russians, who?

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