Vladimir Putin’s statement during his marathon press conference of Dec. 23 that “the first thing to do here is to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets, the money it had in foreign, primarily American, banks, in order to provide the required assistance to the Afghan people. Otherwise, the country could plunge into famine; there will be grave consequences that will affect the neighboring states as well,” should be read as not necessarily identical to, but congruent with, Russia’s proposals concerning stopping the extension of NATO farther eastward. Putin’s statements represent a summary rejection of the Malthusian military outlook characteristic of both trans-Atlantic policies, each of which is based on population reduction in a different way. That same outlook was fought at the COP 26 Halloween Summit, and must now be fought in the worldwide war against pandemics. The Schiller Institute proposal, the pro-life, pro-development “Operation Ibn Sina,” to provide food, water, and medical treatment and supplies, now, is the proper springboard for immediate action and follow-up in Afghanistan, once funds were indeed released.

This is the season of Hope. We don’t know, but have been told, and pass on for corroboration to any who can help verify the rumor, that signs have begun to appear in offices in and around Washington, including at the State Department, Pentagon, the House of Representatives and Senate, among other locations—even the CIA and FBI. They read, “WARNING: Marijuana and other drugs can severely compromise your ability to operate government machinery.” Perhaps with the assistance of the newly-launched James Webb telescope, signs of intelligent life can once again be spotted somewhere near the Washington Beltway. The return to sanity, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in deliberative exchanges with nations such as China and Russia, might be the greatest present that the world could expect to receive from the United States at the beginning of the New Year.

The appearance yesterday in the New York Post of an article entitled “Top Russian official likens Ukraine standoff to Cuban Missile Crisis” has broken the near-blackout in American media on the reality of the ongoing strategic confrontation between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States on the other, which is most advanced at the moment in Ukraine. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, no stranger to the United States (he served in the Russian consulate to Washington from 2002-2006 and is fluent in English), “has compared Moscow’s standoff with the West over a possible invasion of Ukraine to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tense 1962 confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union that led the world to the brink of nuclear war.” More of Ryabkov’s remarks, as well as those of Sergei Lavrov and President Putin appear below.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a co-founder of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS,) has asked why the United States agreed so quickly, as reported by Ryabkov yesterday, to meet with Russia on Monday, January 10, the first day after the end of Russia’s Christmas season. McGovern called attention to an address given to the Russian military by Putin two weeks after his December 7 phone discussion with Biden, in which Putin reported: “Incidentally, during our conversation he [Biden] actually proposed appointing senior officials to oversee [Russian concerns over U.S. missile deployments in Romania, Poland, and possibly Ukraine]…. It was in response to his proposal that we drafted our proposals on precluding the further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of offensive strike systems in the countries bordering on Russia." The Russian proposal was drafted as a response to an initiative proposed by the United States President. It is no”ultimatum."

The chronology is significant. The Washington Post printed the story, “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns” on Dec. 3, with the New York Times following suit on Dec. 5. Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, Sergei Naryshkin, had already responded a week earlier, on Sat., Nov. 27, to assertions made the day before by Karen Donfried, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, about a planned attack on Ukraine. At that time, according to Reuters, “U.S. President Joe Biden said he was concerned about the situation in Ukraine…and added that he will ‘in all probability’ speak with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin.” The Putin-Biden conversation then occurred on Dec. 7, followed by the release of the Russian proposal, and its being reported in the New York Times on Dec. 17: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.”

The Post further reported, “Asked if he was exaggerating by comparing the Ukraine situation to the stalemate over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Sergei Ryabkov said, ‘No, not too much,’ Russian media reported Monday…. ‘We are not bluffing. These are our real proposals. The West’s awareness of this needs to be facilitated and we are going to make every effort to achieve it,’ Ryabkov, who is known for his over-the-top rhetoric, said in an interview with a Russian foreign affairs magazine….”

LaRouche Organization forces know that since the 1970s, on several occasions, the impending danger of thermonuclear war precipitated dialogues involving "“East” and “West” in which this organization played a decisive, if marginal role. Lyndon LaRouche’s personal backchannel negotiations with the then-Soviet Union over the course of the Fall of 1981 through early 1983 resulted in the “miracle” of the Strategic Defense initiative (SDI) policy being adopted by President Ronald Reagan over the fierce opposition of the globalist forces against which FDR, LaRouche, and in this instance Reagan had campaigned for decades.

Now, in the face of one of the greatest threats in humanity’s history—the inaction in response to the emergence of increasingly treatment-resistant bacteria and viruses worldwide, something to which LaRouche called attention as a threat five decades ago—Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed a World Health Platform, as an international strategic intervention, to be organized by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.” She also indicated how a tactical-strategic instance of the application of this “Coincidence of Opposites” principle, as in Afghanistan’s “Operation Ibn Sina,” would provide the means to supersede war, famine, and disease.

At the ongoing 30th anniversary meeting of the heads of state of the nine nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS,) Putin, addressing the coronavirus pandemic as the number one issue on the agenda, introduced Russia’s Chief Sanitary Physician, Anna Popova, to brief people on the current worldwide situation. “Considering the proximity of our states, the commonality of epidemic threats and the level of integration, one of our key tasks is to build a unified system for epidemic response and relief,” she said. Putin himself spoke about “joint scientific activities, the development of medications and preventive drugs, as well as exchanges of test kits and means of overcoming this disease.”

Lyndon LaRouche’s Fall, 2001, “National Defense Against Germ Warfare,” in the section subtitled “National Defense As Sanitation,” identified something with which Putin is familiar, and that any sane head of state should quickly learn: "The most important principles of national defense against bacteriological and related forms of warfare, were consolidated as knowledge in the experience of World War II and the war in Korea. Those lessons were featured in the adoption and implementation of the Hill-Burton legislation adopted shortly after the close of World War II….

“We must situate the role of the medical profession, both in care for the sick and in other ways, as an essential, subsumed feature of public sanitation….” Once again, by returning to the outlook of the United States of Franklin Roosevelt, the true self-interest of a United States facing tens, if not hundreds of millions of cases of infectious disease in the short term, can be re-established by organizing the worldwide symposium proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Dr. Jocelyn Elders, and extending that to the world as a whole as rapidly as possible. That way lies hope, and humanity’s immediate way forward.