By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On January 27 President Donald Trump (lead image) announced: “In June, we obliterated Iran’s nuclear capacity in Operation Midnight Hammer. You saw that. People have been waiting for 22 years to do that, and we were right at the end. They were about a month away from having a nuclear weapon. […]

by Editor - Saturday, January 31st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Trump Administration and its NATO allies are clear: They will escalate their war against Russia at sea, deploying their navies to enforce trade blockades, ship sabotage and seizures, and the closure of sea lanes, and to launch “pre-emptive” attacks before their targets can defend themselves. This is sea war to […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 29th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For the first time since the negotiations to end the Ukraine war began, President Vladimir Putin has sent as the chief Russian negotiator a General Staff officer and military intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov. The two Russians who have been closest to Putin, Vladimir Medinsky and Kirill Dmitriev, are not at […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It is possible that after four hours of talking until almost 4 in the morning, Yury Ushakov, the Kremlin equivalent of the US National Security Advisor, was so tired he omitted to report in his read-out a novel part of the negotiations. Ushakov’s read-out runs for 730 words; it was posted […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 22nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In all large criminal gangs – racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (RICO) as they are termed in US law  – there is always the mouth that talks tough; the pocket which collects the money; the gun that’s the enforcer. The mouth is the most expendable so long as the pocket keeps full […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A quarter of a century ago, President Vladimir Putin explained to President George W. Bush the way the warfighting world really works. “There is a contradiction between a new, young, aggressive financial Islamic capital and the old one,” Putin said.  “In reality, it is a financial issue. Religion is secondary. The […]

by Editor - Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Revealed for the first time in public is that President Vladimir Putin believes that international terrorism of the radical Islamic type is not the result of Middle Eastern conflict or of regional poverty or of Great Power proxy warfighting. Rather, he thinks it is a form of competition of the Marxist-Leninist […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On his way to meet Joseph Stalin in July 1941, Harry Hopkins (lead images, left) landed just out of range of German guns on a Moscow city airfield which, later, stretched a few hundred metres from my kitchen window. In Washington, DC, in 1976, his daughter Diana Hopkins (centre) sold her […]

by Editor - Friday, January 16th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For roughly half a millennium crows have come together in murders; foxes in skulks; cats in clowders; lions in prides; toads in knots; kangaroos in mobs. Podcasts appeared by name roughly twenty-one years ago,   and since then the medium, primarily a US one, has experienced a phenomenal rate of increase of listeners […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be,  a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that […]

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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