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My corpse managed to keep talking for twenty years. That’s the time it took between the Soviet KGB dosing my champagne with a near-fatal volume of a drug called SP-117, in order to get the truth out of me;  and a Russian oligarch sending two gunmen to fire their pistols into me, to stop the […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips. Cool it with a baboon’s blood, then the charm is firm and good. Dear readers, as you peer carefully into the picture of […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow This is the week — the last one before the corporate Catholic Christmas holiday commences and runs into the Russian New Year holiday —  when President Vladimir Putin hosts a supper reception for the oligarchs. It’s a very sensitive affair – for the oligarchs invited, disinvited,  or excluded; and for the […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Mikhail Fridman (lead image, left) and Pyotr (Peter) Aven (right) have launched an effort to persuade high Russian and American government officials that they are in the process of selling their Russian bank,  and also that they are not doing anything of the kind.   Uncharacteristically clumsy of them is the […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow One of the leading war strategists in London, professor to general staff officers and warfighters on both sides of the Atlantic, has lost his brain to an advanced cyber technology designed by the American and British military to win wars by frightening their adversaries into capitulation for fear of being destroyed. […]

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By Christopher Black, Toronto “It is clear the US is pushing the battle line to our door … We can completely regard the US arrest of Meng Wanzhou as a declaration of war against China.” So read an editorial in the Global Times of China on December 6, the day after Meng Wanzhou, chief financial […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Please recognize, if not in yourselves then in others, that there is pleasure in hating. “The pleasure of hating”,  William Hazlitt, an English writer  of two hundred years ago*, compared this to what the British Prime Minister of today calls a novichok – “a poisonous mineral, [which] eats into the heart […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow One side of a well-used coin is the maxim that truth is the first casualty of war. The other side of the coin is that lying is the first weapon of war. According to the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, that’s because all warfare is based on deception. He meant that […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The semi-annual sale of Russian art works in London last week produced signs of stable demand without pessimism for the future. Compared to the estimated valuations in the auction house catalogues, unusually high prices were realized in the bidding for objets d’art, such as miniatures of 18th century Russian court notables; […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow It will be thirty years later this month since a bomb exploded on board Pan American Flight PA 103 (lead image, left), en route from London to New York. The false narrative of the British and US governments, contrived at the time to blame Libya and warrant the overthrow of Libyan […]