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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Ragpicking is a serious women’s business, extracting value from rubbish. Cheerleading is the unserious business of girls waving pompoms at football games. There are those who claim the Kazan Declaration is today’s equivalent of the Bretton Woods Final Act (1944) and Bandung Declaration (1955),  or “a huge manifesto”,    or “victory for […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Government’s investigation of the alleged Novichok attacks against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which they survived, and Dawn Sturgess, who died, has now run for six and half years. The public presentation of evidence and witnesses has completed its first week; the second week of hearings will begin next Monday, […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A two-month delay in Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian electricity infrastructure west of the Dnieper River and  secret talks on end-of-war terms by the Kremlin go-between Vladimir Medinsky (lead image, right) produced two signals from Kiev on Monday – one an offer by Vladimir Zelensky to reciprocate with a limit on […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was murdered on October 20, 2011, and to mark the thirteenth anniversary of his death, the Russian Foreign Ministry received Qaddafi’s daughter, Aisha Qaddafi, in Moscow on Friday. This is the first open meeting in Russia between high-ranking Russian officials and the Qaddafi family. The political […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with “The winners of the war are the Russian General Staff. Everyone in Russia understands that the Russian Army is winning and will win this war…I believe Gilbert is wrong on the history of the negotiations that have gone on since before this war began… It’s [Russian] military protection that guarantees [Ukrainian] […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with According to the Russian Constitution amendments adopted in 2020,  Vladimir Putin can run for re-election in 2030 and win another term until 2036, when he will be 84. The contest over the presidential succession may thus be postponed for another decade. Or else it is under way already. That’s one of […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the first day of public hearings directed by retired judge Anthony Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley (lead image) – the evidence compiled over six years by the police, secret services, CCTV records, and witnesses is that Novichok, identified as one of the world’s fastest acting nerve poisons, was […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The timetable for public hearings has been announced by the British government and its judge, Lord Anthony Hughes, to repeat the official allegations of Novichok attacks by Russian agents against Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, then Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018. The first hearing will open on next […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Russian history of end-of-war negotiations for the capitulation of Germany and for the World War II peace settlement requires it to be understood now: it was the Red Army’s defeat of the enemy on the battlefield all the way to Berlin which preceded and which was the precondition for the […]