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Over the past month, both the mainstream and alternative media worldwide have focused on the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, launched in response to almost nine years of Western provocations since the Euromaidan colour revolution saw the democratically elected Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych overthrown and replaced with the successive pro-Western governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose eight year long war on the breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, involving the use of neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as the Azov Battalion and the ethnic cleansing of both Republics’ predominantly ethic Russian populations, would act as a catalyst for the Russian Federation to intervene militarily in its Western neighbour – with attempts to resolve the situation peacefully by Moscow over the past several months having ultimately amounted to nothing following Kiev’s refusal to implement its’ side of the Minsk Agreements, which would have granted Donetsk and Luhansk a degree of autonomy while still remaining under Ukrainian rule.

In the past week however, the corporate media, has noticeably, in lockstep, switched its focus back to COVID-19, specifically the new ‘BA.2 variant’, and the positive tests of high-profile figures such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jen Psaki and Doug Emhoff, husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris  – media attention which has not been seen since multiple countries worldwide simultaneously dropped all restrictions at the end of January, during the highly coincidental timing of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda virtual event.

This sudden coordinated pivot back to the Covid mainstream media narrative, one that was  suddenly dropped in a similar lockstep fashion two months ago, raises many questions, and with the recent confirmation by current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland – herself instrumental in the original Euromaidan regime change operation – that US-funded labs in Ukraine were developing bioweapons, as well as allegations by the White House that Russia is planning to use chemical weapons as part of the current military operation, there is indication that the sudden media switch to Covid may be used as a means to clear the stage for a deadly escalation in Ukraine – a false flag chemical attack or lab leak, blamed on Russia by the West, and used as means for NATO to launch a ‘No Fly Zone’ over Ukraine, clamoured for by current Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.

Indeed, the staging of a false flag chemical attack as a means to encourage a US-led military intervention is a tactic with very recent usage by Washington’s Neocons.

In 2017, the Syrian Arab Republic had been in the grip of a six-year long regime change operation launched in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s refusal to allow Western-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country. Unlike Libya however, subjected to a similar regime change operation at the same time and overrun and destroyed in the space of eight months by Western-backed terrorists, Syria had been successfully able to withstand the similar Western-backed onslaught launched against its territory, thanks in part to interventions by its’ allies Iran and Russia, which would lead to the regime-change lobby taking reckless measures.

On the 4^th of April 2017, a false flag chemical attack would be launched in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, resulting in the then-US administration of Donald Trump launching a cruise missile strike against the Syrian government-controlled Shayrat airbase three days later, the first direct military engagement between the West and Damascus since the regime change operation began, though one that just stopped short of the full-scale military intervention that the Neocons had hoped for. Undeterred, a similar false flag attack would be launched almost a year to the day later in the city of Douma, this time resulting in the US, Britain and France launching air strikes against Syrian government targets, though again stopping short of a Libya-style ‘No Fly Zone’.

Now with the near inevitability that the stage is being set for the same script to be played out in Ukraine – possibly around the end of May when the World Economic Forum is due to hold its’ first in-person summit in two years – the world must prepare itself for the possible consequences, as even a ‘limited’ strike against Russian military infrastructure, similar to what happened in Syria, would result in the gravest consequence of all – World War III.

Written by Gavin O’Reilly exclusively for SouthFront