Biden sees Putin’s troop buildup and raises with GIs to Eastern Europe; Western nations fold against Omicron.

(Originaly published Feb. 3 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden is sending additional troops to Europe to bolster defenses in the face of Russia’s buildup of troops around Ukraine. It’s a largely symbolic gesture calculated to demonstrate support without jeopardizing diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis. The U.S. is sending 2,000 troops to Germany and Poland, and shifting 1,000 from Germany to Romania. Both Poland and Romania border on Ukraine, but no troops are being sent to Ukraine, which unlike Poland and Romania is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Russia condemned the move as further escalation of tensions in Eastern Europe that underscores the security concerns it says justify its decision to position more than 100,000 troops and heavy artillery around Ukraine, including in Belarus and Moldova. The U.S. and NATO rejected those concerns in their written responses to Moscow, which were leaked Wednesday in Spanish daily El País and can be downloaded here, turning down Russia’s demand for guarantees that Ukraine won’t be admitted to NATO and to remove forces from NATO’s former Soviet satellite members.

Just who the aggressor is in this crisis is up for debate. Russia says NATO has been slowly and aggressively pushing East since the fall of the Soviet Union to undermine its security. The West says tough, Russia has been undermining the security and independence of Eastern Europe since the end of World War II and continues to work against democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Russia can respond that it’s faced threats from Germany for centuries and from the U.S. since 1917 with the notable exception of their fragile alliance against Nazi Germany. The West can respond that that’s all ancient history—a free and democratic Eastern Europe is the new status quo, and that Ukraine has every right to join NATO if it wants. Russian President Vladimir Putin feels that Ukraine is sort of Russia’s Canada and needs to remain in Moscow’s embrace.

But the answer may be moot as both sides push each other ever-close to present-day confrontation. In a new analysis, The New York Times’ David Sanger explains that U.S. accusations of Russia’s incremental buildup represent an effort to tattle on Russia by announcing what it says are Moscow’s secret plans, including a slow buildup to invasion, touched off by a false-flag operation and resulting in the installation in Kyiv of a pro-Moscow puppet regime. But whether such accusations can either prepare Ukraine and NATO to repel an invasion or discourage Russia from launching one is debatable. And Sanger asks whether, by publicizing the supposed results of its spying, the U.S. is only antagonizing Putin.

Indeed, Putin has rather disingenuously accused the West of trying to goad Russia into invading after having built up troops around Ukraine. Evidence that Moscow has been shipping supplies of blood and is now building structures to house troops near their positions around Ukraine are being used to suggest that Putin’s mind is already made up to invade.

Moscow may also be drawing encouragement from Beijing. China has voiced support for Russia’s grievances against NATO, and may undermine the threat of Western sanctions. Putin will get the chance to sound out his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Friday when the two meet ahead of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

A very dangerous news article from the Associated Press news agency is being picked up today and published by websites and newspapers globally, headlined “‘Take back life’: More nations ease coronavirus restrictions.”

The story sums up the long list of countries relaxing restrictions aimed at reducing transmission of Covid-19, and suggests that these moves are justified by falling infection rates and have the endorsement of the World Health Organization. It states in its fourth paragraph that, despite Omicron having infected more people in 10 weeks than Covid did in all of 2020, “the World Health Organization this week said some countries can now consider carefully relaxing the rules if they have high immunity rates, their health care systems are strong and the epidemiological trends are going in the right direction.”

There doesn’t appear to be any statement from the WHO resembling the AP’s assertion, which appears to be in error. On the contrary, the WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday made a speech that the article later cites:

We’re concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines, and because of Omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity, preventing transmission is no longer possible, and no longer necessary.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

More transmission means more deaths. We are not calling for any country to return to so-called lockdown. But we are calling on all countries to protect their people using every tool in the toolkit, not vaccines alone.

It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory.

You can listen to him say this here. The AP article goes on to quote Tedros in its 22nd paragraph, even adding a quote from WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan: “WHO’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, warned that political pressure could lead some countries to open back up too soon — and ‘that will result in unnecessary transmission, unnecessary severe disease and unnecessary death.’”

It’s unclear how the reporter who wrote this article or his editors managed to so clearly and prominently mischaracterize the WHO’s position, but by doing so it has framed moves by nations responding to extreme pandemic fatigue after two years of fitful fighting against Covid as evidence of a long-awaited pandemic spring.

We aren’t there yet, but this article will undoubtedly be seized on by those arguing against continued vigilance as welcome news that bolsters their case.

The “Take back life” slogan used to precede the articles headline paraphrases a quote attributed to Norway’s health minister: “Now it’s time for us to take back our everyday life,” Norwegian Health Minister Ingvild Kjerkol said Tuesday. “Tonight, we scrap most measures so we can be closer to living a normal life.”

While deaths are falling in Norway, the infection rate remains near an all-time high. And while cases have begun to fall in other countries that are relaxing restrictions, such as France, Britain and the United States, infection rates remain at extremely high levels and deaths are still rising sharply. Omicron and its newer subvariant, BA.2, are so infectious that, despite lower severity, more and more people are dying than when previous strains prevailed. And the virus is still sweeping through overlooked pockets of vulnerable people, like America’s prisons.

A new study gives some sense of just how infectious Covid really is: Researchers at the Imperial College of London studying the original strain of Covid-19 found that exposure to a single nasal droplet was enough to infect subjects. And that was with Covid Classic. I’m not sure how big a nasal droplet is or how a droplet might be divided, but it seems Omicron would be capable of infecting an individual with a fraction of the nasal material. Gross.