By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the time being the Trump Administration and its allies conduct their war against Russia on the high seas, outside defended territorial waters, against ship targets which are unarmed, threaten no resistance. This is piracy, effective if the sight of the skull-and-bones flag triggers fear, shock, immediate surrender.

In the Caribbean against Venezuela, President Donald Trump is displaying an enormous naval force:  “the largest Armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” he tweeted on December 16.  “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before”.  

Then the US Coast Guard announced that it lacks the men and firepower to board and seize the Bella-1 oil tanker, owned by China and heading to Venezuela to load crude oil for delivery to Chinese refineries. “The days-long pursuit [of the Bella-1] highlights the mismatch between the Trump administration’s desire to seize sanctioned oil tankers near [sic] Venezuela and the limited resources of the agency that is mainly carrying out operations, the Coast Guard,” a US official announced on December 23.  “A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Coast Guard officials on the [USS Gerald] Ford were from a Maritime Security Response Team and at the time too far from Bella 1 to carry out a boarding operation.”

The next day, December 24, Trump officials lowered their flag to half-mast. “The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a ‘quarantine’ of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters, indicating Washington is currently more interested in using economic rather than military means to pressure Caracas.”  ‘While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),’ the official said on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

In the Mediterranean, the cover story for drone attacks on tankers operating for the Russian oil trade is that it’s the Ukrainians at work, reportedly firing from 1,500 kilometres to the north.

More certainly, the small drone detonation  on the deck of the Qendil southwest of Crete on December 19 was fired from Tympaki, a Greek Coast Guard base on Crete armed with Israeli and NATO drones and using US and NATO satellite and live airborne electronic surveillance. Although claimed by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) , this was an act of war by the Greek Government against Russia – and it failed. The Qendil has continued under its own power through the Aegean to Nemrut Bay, Turkey.  Omani-flagged, with Indian management and a Russian master,  the Qendil  was empty at the time of the attack.  

This is a war between the 3,300-tanker alternative fleet (alt-fleet) versus a mainstream fleet of about 5,000 vessels  in which the world oil tanker market has been cut in half by the international war between Russia, China, India, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea on one side, and the US, the NATO allies, Israel,  and Japan on the other.  

At sea, for the time being, this is a war of provocation,  profiteering,  and face-saving short of shooting. The more time that goes by, however, the stronger the Venezuelan government grows in resistance, and the closer to capitulation the US and NATO-backed regime in Kiev.

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by Editor - Thursday, December 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The official record of three conversations President Vladimir Putin (lead images, right) had with President George W. Bush (lead images, left) in 2001, 2005, and 2008 has just been released in Washington.

This follows a federal court lawsuit to compel the US National Archives to speed up the declassification process which was initially to have ended in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, and which the Biden Administration then attempted to block for another decade.  A lawsuit, filed in November 2024, identified 19 separate face-to-face meetings between Putin and Bush, and 73 telephone calls over Bush’s two terms, 2001-2009.  

Stonewalling by the National Archives and the White House ended with the release of documents early this month. Three texts have been released and can be read in full here.   Other records, including telephone calls, are expected to follow.

The hitherto secret remarks of Putin are almost identical with what he was saying at the time in public, and what he has subsequently said in opposition to the US plans to make the Ukraine a platform for NATO threats to Russia.

Equally unsurprising is the record that Bush made of his readiness to listen to Putin, and also of his evasiveness and misrepresentation in response – amplified at the time by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Yury Ushakov, then Russian Ambassador to the US, were present at the second and third meetings, the record shows they had less than their counterparts to say – that is, next to nothing.

Read in retrospect since Putin has negotiated strategic partnership and defence agreements with North Korea in 2024 and Iran this year, Putin’s negative references towards the North Korean and Iran leaders he had met are noteworthy. “There may be a lot of nuts there”, Putin said of the North Koreans in 2005, “but not everyone is.” About the Iranians, whom Bush called “religious nuts with nuclear weapons”, Putin responded: “They’re quite nuts…They may be crazy in their ideology, but they are intellectuals…That was quite a surprise to me.”   

Putin added a qualifier. He believed North Korea’s policies, he told Bush, were the result of the security threats imposed by the US and its ally South Korea, and that no change could be expected until and unless these were lifted. “The North Koreans live in more seclusion than we lived in,” Putin said.  “They are more isolated than the Soviet Union under Stalin. The overwhelming number are prepared to die. This is not East Europe or East Germany. For any serious change in mindset, there needs to be rapprochement between the North and South.” Bush did not reply.

Putin’s response was different when Bush told him Iranian nuclear weapons technology was “scaring” Israel. “The military option stinks,” Bush claimed, referring to Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment operations. “But we can’t take it off the table. [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is thinking about the military option. If you or I were Sharon, we’d be thinking about the military option. Iranian nukes really scare the Israelis. Diplomacy must work. That’s an important point to keep in mind. If Sharon feels he needs to strike Iran, all hell will break loose. I’m not saying it will happen, only that the most likely military reactions will come from Israel.”  

Putin is evasive. “But what will they target?” he asks.  Left unsaid is that Putin conceded that  Israeli nuclear weapons threatened Iran with US support, and that he accepted that US would  support Israel to attack Iran’s counter-deterrent. Putin did not tell Bush that until and unless the US and Israel lifts the nuclear attack threat against Iran, there could be no reciprocal security although the Iranians, like the North Koreans, had told him exactly that.

This is telling with the hindsight of Putin’s acquiescence in Israel’s June 2025 attacks on Iran during a telephone call on June 13 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,  and his response to Trump’s bombing of three nuclear technology sites on June 23.  “Who says we should have done more,” Putin declared on June 20, “— what is more? Starting some kind of combat operations, or what?”   

Twenty years earlier, on September 16, 2005, Bush had told Putin: “But we aren’t doing the targeting for Israel”.  Putin knew then Bush was lying; Putin prevaricated. “But it’s not clear what the [Iranian] labs have, where they are. Cooperation with Pakistan still exists”, Putin went on, attempting to get Bush to respond on US military and intelligence assistance to Pakistan.

Bush was evasive.  “I am concerned about Pakistan,” Putin said. “It is just a junta with nuclear weapons. It is no democracy, yet the West makes no criticism of it. Should talk about it.” Bush didn’t want to, so Putin asked Bush about the problem of terrorism spilling out of Afghanistan to attack both Russia and the US.  “What should we do about the Taliban? I asked Clinton but never got back a straight answer.”

Bush was evasive again. “Armitage [Deputy Secretary of State] and George Tenet [CIA Director] have my full cooperation”. Putin replied: “Perhaps now, after your elections [November 2006], there will be fewer games.”

There weren’t.

Five weeks later, on October 29, 2005, the Pakistan-directed terrorist group  Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) bombed crowds in New Delhi, India, killing 67 and wounding more than 200.

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the International System of Units, hertz is a unit of frequency for measuring the number of times a repeating event occurs per second, like waves, cycles or vibrations of pitch, sound, or electrical current.  The common multiples are kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz.

Merz is the unit measuring the number of times German politicians and soldiers repeat the mistake of thinking themselves so superior to the Slavs or Russian race, they will be able to defeat them in war.  The name in German for the gigamerz multiple is Friedrich (lead image).

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we go over the evidence that the drone attack on the Qendil  oil tanker off the south coast of Crete was a US-NATO operation disguised to look like a Ukrainian one. Then we discuss the implications for the European states and the UK in the escalation of the war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield to the high seas – from the Meditearranean to the Baltic, Atlantic, and the Caribbean.

Click to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEk86o9–I 

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by Editor - Monday, December 22nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Blowing the shofar, the Jewish ritual ram’s horn, has traditionally been the signal to start an attack or a war, and also to celebrate victory at the end of a war.  

In the lead picture, two rabbis, Eli Schlanger (left) and Yossi Friedman (right) blew the shofar above Bondi Beach in Sydney in September 2019.    Schlanger was the assistant rabbi in the Chabad Lubavitcher religious organisation in Bondi;  Friedman has been the Jewish chaplain to the Australian Air Force  and runs a rabbi-on-demand service in Sydney.  

Schlanger was the organiser of the annual celebration of Hanukkah; that was a civil war and rebellion against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in 167 BC.  The Hanukkah ceremony was held on Bondi Beach on December 14. Schlanger was one of the fifteen killed during the shooting attack by Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, father and son, in which the father was killed by police.

Wounded but surviving, Naveed Akram has been charged with 15 counts of murder; one count of committing a terrorist act; 40 counts of wounding with intent to murder; and one count of “caus[ing] public display of a prohibited terrorist org[anisation] symbol.” The police have not released the text of the indictment. “Police will allege in court the man engaged in conduct that caused death, serious injury and endangered life to advance a religious cause and cause fear in the community,” a local newspaper has reported.   

The NSW statute defining terrorist acts says they are “an action where…(b) the action is done with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, and (c) the action is done with the intention of– (i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country, or (ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.”   

The law explicitly excludes from this definition of terrorism “if it– (a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action, and (b) is not intended– (i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person, or (ii) to cause a person’s death, or (iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action, or (iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.”

The Australian Government’s release of “listed terrorist organizations” includes Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, with its coalition partner Palestinian Islamic Jihad;   Hezbollah, part of the Lebanese government coalition; Ansar Allah, the ruling authority in Yemen;   Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the ruling authority in Syria; and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in civil war againast the Turkish Government in Ankara.   

According to the statute implementing this list, the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Prohibited Hate Symbols and Other Measures) Act of 2023,  symbols such as flags, hand gestures, pictures, and speech “advocating terrorism or genocide” are criminal. The offence, under this law, “applies if a reasonable person would consider that the conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) involves advocacy that: (a)  is advocacy of hatred of: (i)  a group of persons distinguished by race, religion or nationality (a targeted group ); or (ii)  a member of a targeted group…  it does not matter whether the conduct actually results in the hatred mentioned in that paragraph…For the purposes of paragraph (4)(b), it does not matter whether the conduct actually incites another person as mentioned in that paragraph…this subsection applies if the conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) is likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person who is:  (a)  a reasonable person; and (b)  a member of a group of persons distinguished by race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion or national or social origin; because of the reasonable person’s membership of that group.”  

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have subsequently arrested and charged a 19-year old man for speech and hand gestures on board an aircraft flying from Bali, Indonesia, to Sydney airport. The AFP have charged “one count of threatening force or violence against members of groups or close associates, contrary to section 80.2BB(2) of the Criminal Code (Cth).  The offence carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. The AFP received a request for assistance from an airline on 17 December, 2025, in relation to an incident on a flight from Bali to Sydney. Police will allege the man made antisemitic threats and hand gestures indicating violence towards the alleged victim, who the man knew to be affiliated with the Jewish community. AFP officers arrested and charged the man on his arrival into Sydney International Airport. He was refused bail to appear before NSW Local Bail Division Court 7 today.”  

In the Australian context of the murders at Bondi Beach, the evidence made public so far linking the Akram killings to terrorism is a black flag of the Islamic state shown in videoclips fixed to the windscreen of their car.   

Published research before the incident has revealed that since the beginning of the Hamas military operation against Israel in October 2023,  “reports of antisemitism in Australia increased 738% and Islamophobia increased 1300%”,  and  that “anti-Palestinian racism is a specific and documented form of Islamophobia.”   Critics of the Australian hate-speech laws and lists have registered many objections, including taking sides in “strong disagreements between religions.”

In this context then, in the war in Gaza ruled to have method and intent of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians by the International Court of Justice  — does the evidence and the law apply to the Chabad Lubavitcher organisation in their support for the Gaza genocide? Click to view the podcast with Jamarl Thomas.  

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by Editor - Sunday, December 21st, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There’s a line in Shooting the Past, a 1999 film by the London filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff, in which the leading character, who runs a large historical photo archive, asks whether it is possible for a photograph to capture a lie coming out of the mouth of a liar. The character isn’t sure.

He hadn’t studied the neuropsychology of interrogation researched by William Marston, inventor of the polygraph, and Paul Ekman, the psychologist of facial expressions whose methods were dramatised in the US television series, Lie to Me.  Those two claimed lies can be detected by mechanical or electronic records.

In politics and war, lying is a weapon and so it is heavily camouflaged. It can defeat the truth by techniques that prevent evidence and the courtroom standards for reasoning and judgement from controlling the narrative. The Bondi Beach attack on December 14, in Sydney, Australia, is an example. Listen to the hour-long podcast with Nima Alkhorshid to understand what has happened.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 17th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump wants to turn the Indian Ocean (lead image) into a zone of deterrence against war. That’s to say, he aims to deter anyone from objecting to, resisting or defending against his terms for the wars (and ceasefires) US forces are currently fighting against Yemen, Iran, Sudan, and through Pakistan, against India.

Those wars, according to Trump’s National Security strategy, released last month,  are being waged, and will continue, against “threats against our supply chains that risk U.S. access to critical resources, including minerals and rare earth elements”; to “ensure that allied economies do not become subordinate to any competing power”; and to “prevent domination by any single competitor nation.”  

In the Indian Ocean and in the narrow straits between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, that last target, according to the Trump strategy paper, is currently China. But when Trump says “our commitment [is to] to a free and open Indo-Pacific” what he means is a warning for India: “we must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India to encourage New Delhi to contribute to Indo-Pacific security, including through continued quadrilateral cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (the Quad).”   

That parenthetical “other” is Trump’s cat out of the American strategy bag. It’s “unconventional diplomacy, America’s military might, and economic leverage to surgically extinguish embers of division between nuclear-capable nations and violent wars”.  

It’s also an ultimatum — either India, the nuclear-armed state which defeated Pakistan in the war of last May, improves its commercial and military “relations” with the US on Trump’s terms now; or else Trump will punish India and target it as a “competitor nation”. Trump’s carrot is that “we should present partners with a suite of inducements—for instance, high tech cooperation, defence purchases, and access to our capital markets—that tip decisions in our favor.” Trump’s stick is that “strong measures must be developed along with the deterrence necessary to keep those lanes open, free of ‘tolls,’ and not subject to arbitrary closure by one country. This will require not just further investment in our military—especially naval—capabilities, but also strong cooperation with every nation that stands to suffer, from India to Japan and beyond, if this problem is not addressed.”  

What Trump means by keeping the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean open, “free of tolls or arbitrary closure”, has the same meaning as the US Navy and allied forces are currently applying against tankers moving Russian, Iranian or Venezuelan oil.   Empires don’t use force at sea for piracy; it’s privatization, according to their rules-based international order.  

For India, Trump’s meaning is the same as it was six hundred years ago for Afonso de Albuquerque and the Portuguese; they were the first European maritime empire to attack India. Then, as now, it also meant attacking the Yemeni shore of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf shore, seizing the cargoes of vessels trading with India, killing all on board, and building forts, naval anchorages, and trading bases along the Malabar Coast.  

India and Russia have a different idea now. That’s RELOS.

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by Editor - Sunday, December 14th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Anthony Hughes was in such a hurry to open and shut the British Government’s case against President Vladimir Putin for the Novichok chemical warfare attack in England in 2018, he failed to tie the top button of his shirt.

This was also a precaution against choking on what Hughes recited as his conclusions to more than seven years of investigations, five months of autopsy, toxicology, and post-mortem pathology, then just 24 days of public hearings,  which he read from a prepared script on his desk. At the 21-minute mark,  to the doctors, lawyers, policemen, intelligence agents, and “to the many people who made the vital administrative arrangements for the Inquiry to function at all,” Hughes looked down to read out “thank you very much”; shuffled the pages into a notebook, and left the room.  No public or press questions were allowed.

It had taken a special kind of expertise for Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — to exclude the four crucial pieces of evidence which surfaced in the inquiry he has conducted since 2022 into the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death.  This is the evidence (1) that the alleged Russian Novichok weapon, a bottle of perfume, was planted by British government agents in Sturgess’s kitchen twelve days after police drug squad searches had failed to find it; (2) that the colour of the liquid in this bottle was yellow, according to an expert witness, when Novichok is colourless; (3) that the only witness to finding the perfume bottle and giving it to Sturgess, her boyfriend Charles Rowley, was so incapable of telling the truth he was excluded from testifying in public; and (4) that the expert pathologists who had conducted the post-mortem investigations between July and November 2018 had recorded enough fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream to have been the cause of her heart and then brain death  before Novichok was detected by the British chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.  

Instead, Hughes has reported only the evidence to fit the British government’s version of a Russian attack with Novichok.  

The judge did more. He reported that what he had been told of the Russian recovery of Crimea in March 2014 and the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 four months later was “the most likely analysis” of President Putin’s motivation for ordering the Novichok operation of 2018.

Hughes went further still.

“There are two more pieces of evidence,” he declared in last week’s report,   “which may be relevant to the question of Russian state responsibility for the events into which I had to inquire. One concerns an incident near to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Netherlands. The other concerns Alexei Navalny. Both are examples of second-hand evidence, or hearsay, which can of course be reliable, but which I did not have the opportunity to explore in any detail… Neither of the two additional areas of evidence now summarised would be enough by themselves to justify the conclusions which I have reached here. But both may provide some limited additional support for those conclusions, at which I arrived without needing to call upon them, and I ought to refer to them both” [page 90].

This was Hughes sticking his neck well beyond his shirt collar: the official terms of reference limited him to investigating  “how; when and where [Dawn Sturgess] came by her death; and the particulars (if any) required by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to be registered concerning the death; Identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.”  

The evidence of Russian military operations he accepted had come from “closed Inquiry hearings in January 2025,” Hughes said. “The hearings lasted several days. Attendance at the hearings was limited to myself, members of the Inquiry Team, and appropriate members of the teams for His Majesty’s Government (HMG) and Operation Verbasco. The hearings took place in a government building in London. During the closed hearings, as in the open hearings, I heard oral evidence from witnesses and also received submissions from Counsel regarding documentary evidence. A number of witnesses were called and questioned during the closed hearings. The witnesses included Commander Dominic Murphy (Commander of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15)), MK26 (Chemical and Biological Scientific Adviser, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Porton Down) and also witnesses represented by HMG. The HMG witnesses included individuals who had been personally involved in making decisions regarding Sergei Skripal’s security prior to March 2018”  [page 121].

The last sentence identifies the MI6 or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Together with the other UK government agencies, police,  and officials engaged in the manufacture and testing of chemical warfare weapons, this was a conference to compose evidence made up to look like a cross-examination and interrogation, but kept secret to shut out doubt.

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by Editor - Friday, December 12th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As all cricket and football followers know, the British are bad losers.  They blame the other side or the umpire; they stampede inside the stadium, then they riot outside.

They believe their cleverness is in getting the media to portray their defeats on the battlefield as feats of heroism. That’s been the British story against Russia from the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Novichok operation of 2018. The success of both these stories as wartime propaganda has depended on public belief in little fools sitting on tall horses — noblemen whose ambition has braced them against their deceit and camouflaged their mental incapacity.   

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Seven months ahead of time, Roman Hofman (Гофман, Gofman), military secretary (advisor) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since April 2024,  has been nominated as the new director of Mossad, succeeding David Barnea whose term ends in June 2026.

Netanyahu’s move cuts Gofman’s tenure in the prime minister’s office prematurely short; it also pre-empts Barnea’s attempt to promote succession candidates of his own with intelligence service which Hofman lacks.

According to the Israeli Government announcement, Hofman, an artillery specialist and tank commander,  qualifies for the post with “creativity, initiative, stratagem, deep recognition of the enemy, absolute discretion, and the safeguarding of secrets. These qualities, as well as his leadership and courage, were evident at the outbreak of the War of Redemption, when he rushed from his home and fought in person against Hamas terrorists in the Western Negev, where he was severely wounded.”  

The nomination of an outsider, promoted for his “aggressively offensive nature” in the Gaza war since October 2023, the December 2024 war against Syria, and then the June 2025 war against Iran, and as a personal trustie by Netanyahu, is running into criticism inside Israel,   although it is not unusual for former army generals to be moved into the Mossad.  This criticism of Hofman is not for a lack of enthusiasm towards genocide and other war crimes by the Israel Defence Forces.   

Yevgeny Krutikov, a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer and now a security analyst for Vzglyad, has just published an assessment of the Hofman appointment; he reveals not so much what the Russian intelligence services are expecting, but what they want Hofman and Netanyahu to know they think. Krutikov’s conclusion is that the move is a “result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political games, which does not correspond well with the real tasks of the country’s intelligence community. As a result, we will see a temporary reduction in so-called ‘offensive’ operations, and we can even predict a decline in the effectiveness of the Mossad, maybe even  high-visibility failures.”  

Krutikov doesn’t mention that Hofman was sent to Moscow by Netanyahu in September 2024 “to promote the [Gaza] hostage deal”.   It isn’t clear what language Hofman used, since he reportedly cannot speak English and left his Russian-speaking home in Belarus as a boy of thirteen.  Subsequent Israeli reporting from March of this year indicates that Hofman has returned to Moscow for negotiations on “strengthening cooperation between Israel and Russia in the interests of Israel’s security…also [the] Russian role in Syria.”  

While there is no Russian report of who received Hofman at the Defense Ministry or General Staff, Krutikov’s report indicates he is unrespected, untrusted, unliked.

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week it was President Donald Trump telling reporters he didn’t know what response President Vladimir Putin had made to the term-sheet for ending the Ukraine war which he sent to the Kremlin on December 2 with Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner.  

“I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing,” Trump said on December 3. “I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We’re going to find out. It’s a war that should have never been started…It’s a war if I were president — we had a rigged election. If I were president that war would have never happened. It’s a terrible thing. But I thought they had a very good meeting yesterday with President Putin. We’ll see what happens. President Putin had a very good meeting yesterday with Jared Kushner and with Steve Witkoff. What comes out of that meeting I can’t tell you because it does take two to tango. You know, Ukraine — I think we have something pretty well worked out with them…[Putin] would like to end the war. That’s what they — that was their impression. Now, whether or not — that was their impression. You know, their impression was that he would like to see the war ended. I think he’d like to get back to a more normal life. I think he’d like to be trading with the United States of America, frankly, instead of losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal. We’ll see what happens.”  

This week, on December 7, Trump claimed it is Vladimir Zelensky who doesn’t know. “So we’ve been speaking to President Putin and we’ve been speaking to Ukrainian leaders, including Zelenskyy, President Zelensky. And I have to say that I’m a little bit disappointed that President Zelenskyy hasn’t yet read the proposal. That was as of a few hours ago. His people love it, but he hasn’t. Russia’s fine with it. Russia’s, you know, Russia, Russia, I guess, would rather have the whole country, wouldn’t you think a bit? But, uh, Russia is, I believe, fine with it, but I’m not sure that Zelenskyy’s fine with it. His people love it, but he hasn’t read it.”  

Although Witkoff had telephoned Zelensky the day before, telling him the new deadline for an agreement on the term sheet is “by Christmas”,  Trump repeated the know-nothing claim in an interview on December 8.  “Well, he’s gotta read the proposal. He hadn’t re … really, he hasn’t read it yet. [Question: The most recent draft?] That’s as of yesterday. Maybe he’s read it over the night. It would be nice if he would read it. You know, a lot of people are dying. So it would be really good if he’d read it. His people loved the proposal. They really liked it. His lieutenants, his top people, they liked it, but they said he hasn’t read it yet. I think he should find time to read it.”  

As this negotiation spills into public view, there is no Russian, American, European,  or Ukrainian record that Kushner has said anything.  

However, since he returned from the Kremlin talks to the US, Kushner and his father-in-law, the President, have been busy in a multi-billion dollar bidding takeover of a Hollywood film production company,  Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). When WBD rejected the Kushner alliance bid of $41 billion in equity, $54 billion in bank loans, for a lowball offer of $83 billion from Netflix,  Trump announced he might veto the deal on monopoly grounds. “That’s got to go through a process and we’ll see what happens,” Trump announced. “Uh, Netflix is a great company… But it’s a, it’s a lot of market share so we’ll have to see what happens.”  

The next day,  Kushner, with the Trump campaign financiers the Ellison family, and the Saudi, Abu Dhabi and Qatari state investment funds proposed a hostile takeover bid of $108 billion for WBD,  all cash, no debt, to defeat Netflix.   Trump, the US government and the press have been more transparent on the term sheets for ending the war for WBD than they have for the Ukraine war.

Outwitting Trump was the objective of the summit meeting in Delhi of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 4-5.  But because the Trump White House and their media camp followers have been preoccupied with their money shot at Hollywood, the reality has been accelerating in an altogether different direction.

Here is the story in the new Dialogue Works podcast with Nima Alkhorshid.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
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