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By John Helmer, Moscow First there was the red-line announcement. On Friday in Athens there was the cross-hairs statement. By the month of October, the month before the US presidential election, there will be the trigger point. The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies are going to war with Russia, accelerating the […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow A lucky man can stumble upon a treasure, runs an old Russian proverb; an unlucky one can’t even find a mushroom. If he does find a mushroom, Lewis Carroll’s account of Alice in Wonderland added a problematic choice: eating one side of the mushroom may dwarf you; eating the other may […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow An Australian coroner and a firm of Sydney, Australia, lawyers have taken the global lead in fabricating criminal charges and billion-dollar compensation claims for the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — without producing evidence. Michael Barnes (lead image), a former tabloid journalist and now coroner for the state of New […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Since he first came to Russia as a Dutch journalist with leftwing claims, money, unlike butter, has always melted in Derk Sauer’s mouth (lead image). Until last week there’s been a quite lot of it — more of it for Sauer to keep than for the string of loss-making publications he […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The privations of war and the taste for oysters don’t usually go in the same direction. Two years into the new war, the problem now for Russian oyster farmers is that if they aren’t careful, they may harvest not just plenty of home-grown oysters to replace imports within a year or […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow “There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line.” That was President Vladimir Putin’s declaration on March 18, 2014, when he addressed a special assembly of the Russian parliament before the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation was enacted. It is likely to […]

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By Simon Hewitt, Geneva* AN AUCTION staged in Paris this March has written another unedifying chapter in the art market history of the Russian Avant-Garde.

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By John Helmer, Moscow The ex-Polish Foreign Minister and ex-Speaker of the Polish parliament, Radoslaw Sikorski, has failed to disclose his wife, Anne Applebaum’s (lead, right) income for 2015, in the annual disclosure required by Polish law for government officials and members of parliament. He has also failed to report his own income for several […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska has launched an attack on Leonid Mikhelson, GennadyTimchenko and Kirill Shamalov in an oligarch showdown which President Vladimir Putin must decide, because Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev cannot. Not since 2008, when Deripaska appealed to Putin for support of his attempt to take Norilsk Nickel away from Vladimir Potanin, has […]