The positive news of a Russian coronavirus vaccine, the first in the world, comes as a Russian opposition leader was poisoned with a chemical agent called Novichok that can be traced back to the old Soviet days. Clearly, the Russians have some expertise in the areas of germ warfare and bioterrorism.

Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State, says, “The United States is deeply concerned by reported preliminary conclusions from German medical experts that Russian opposition activist Aleksey Navalny was poisoned.” Navalny was sent to Germany for medical treatment.

This has put German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a difficult spot, since she has been proceeding with the $11 billion gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that will make Germany more dependent on Russia for its energy needs. Merkel blames the Russians for the attempted assassination of Navalny, but doesn’t want to cancel cooperation with Russia on the pipeline, which is near completion. President Donald J. Trump, supposedly a Russian agent, has been pressuring Merkel to abandon Nord Stream 2, pay her NATO dues, and buy gas from America.

What’s fascinating is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a KGB colonel in East Germany and may have supervised the rise of a young German communist youth leader, Angela Merkel, destined to become chancellor of Germany after reunification.

The “October Surprise” is here. Now, less than 60 days before the presidential election, Trump finds himself in the middle of a confrontation involving Germany with Vladimir Putin and Russia. He can stand up to Putin and Merkel at the same time, while exposing the communists on the streets of America with a proposed Nuremberg Initiative to put Putin and his comrades on trial for crimes against humanity.

These extraordinary developments, coming on the eve of America’s 9/11 commemoration, remind us of another poisoning case involving Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer, he had identified Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda, as a Soviet KGB agent. Litvinenko was poisoned in London and killed after he wrote a book, Blowing up Russia, on how Russian agents are behind certain acts of alleged Islamic terrorism.

Ayman Zawahiri, still a Most Wanted Terrorist, was director of al Qaeda’s biological weapons program.

As various experts have argued, the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were never solved by the FBI because the evidence suggests the anthrax was stolen by an al Qaeda operative from a U.S. lab. Admitting this major breach of security was too much for the Deep State to admit. Instead, Robert Mueller’s FBI blamed the attacks on a dead American scientist, Bruce Ivins.

As we remember the lives lost on 9/11, don’t forget that not only couldn’t the CIA and FBI stop the attacks, they couldn’t even stop the al Qaeda terrorists from coming into the U.S. and taking flight training on U.S. soil.

The anthrax letters praised Allah, a tip-off to the identity of the perpetrators, and one of the hijackers was spotted a few days before the assault in a Palm Beach, Florida, pharmacy getting medication for his hands, which had become red and swollen. Another hijacker, who lived and trained as a pilot in Florida where the anthrax attacks began, went to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale complaining of a nasty leg lesion that could have been caused by anthrax. Yet FBI officials dismissed this evidence.

Incredibly, General Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), has just revealed that the U.S. knows where Zawahiri is based. He says, “The home of al Qaeda is in eastern Afghanistan right up against the border (with Pakistan), [a] very small presence there, but the global leader [Zawahiri] is there.”

Trump’s promise to withdraw U.S. troops from the nearly 19-year war in Afghanistan depends on neutralizing Zawahiri. But the Russians may be protecting him. After all, he’s their agent.

The Navalny poisoning continues a trend. As I discussed in a 1995 American Legion Magazine article about Novichok, the Soviets have long been interested in the use of poisons, Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of foreign intelligence of the NKVD (later called KGB), reveals in his book Special Tasks the existence of a poison laboratory, called "Lab X," as far back as 1937. The lab developed poisons used to assassinate enemies of Moscow at home and aboard.

After the 2018 Novichok poisoning of military intelligence defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England, former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky—who met his own unfortunate demise on October 27, 2019, in England—said, “If two cruise missiles were to be launched at the Lubyanka, the level of terrorism worldwide would drop by approximately 80 percent.”

Lubyanka is the name for the headquarters of the FSB, formerly the KGB.

As President Trump has said repeatedly, his opposition to Nord Stream 2 has done far more to undermine the Putin regime than anything Biden, Hillary, or Obama ever did over the course of their political careers.

But Trump can go further, without going to war, by promoting the so-called Nuremberg initiative of trials for Communists and their fellow travelers. As Geert Wilders, a critic of radical Islam who wrote the book Marked for Death notes,“…although defeated Nazi Germany was subject to de-Nazification, there was no de-Marxification after the fall of communism….And without the public accounting of a trial, people tend to forget how evil communism was.”

Trump could adopt the initiative—challenging Democrats to support a proposal that would, as a by-product, highlight the evil nature of the ideology that is currently driving the violent activities of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa groups on the streets of American cities. The real communist dupes would be exposed in the process.