By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Roman Abramovich — the oligarch whom President Vladimir Putin has publicly declared to be “trustworthy and honourable”  and sent to Kiev last month to negotiate war terms  — has what is known on police blotters as FORM. That is a long list of previous offences; dishonesty, deception, bribery, and extortion as […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 10th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with There was a map of the world on the wall of the Billy Mitchell Room of the Arctic Warrior Events Centre. That’s where President Donald Trump met President Vladimir Putin at Elmendorf Richardson Airbase in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025. On the map, the world was flat. Crisscrossing it were […]

by Editor - Tuesday, June 9th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Last week, the Supreme Commander in Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin, revealed two military secrets of his strategy for achieving Russia’s war aims on the Ukraine battlefield. They involve weapons he has fired in the past.   The first was the launch of the Oreshnik missile (lead image) […]

by Editor - Monday, June 8th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s a brave king who fights on after losing his arms and his legs. It’s a foolish king who asks his army and his people to believe in the certainty of swift victory and then requires them to pay the costs of attrition. Or is it the other way round — […]

by Editor - Friday, June 5th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Bringing the war home was a powerful slogan of the American anti-war movement in the decade between 1965 and 1975,  as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army advanced towards their victory, forcing the White House to armistice terms in Paris in January 1973, and then to evacuation of Saigon in […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Tehran Times spoke with John Helmer, a veteran journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Moscow, to assess the implications of the conflict for U.S. policy toward Iran, the role of domestic political calculations in Washington, and shifting regional alignments. In this interview, Helmer examines coercive diplomacy, regional security dynamics, and the […]

by Editor - Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When it comes to heads of state and government like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, there’s nothing new under the sun. Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t shine often enough to reveal what they say in secret so that this can be compared with what they are saying in public at the same […]

by Editor - Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with President Vladimir Putin has ordered his two spokesmen, Dmitry Peskov and Yury Ushakov, to deny Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that the General Staff has been authorized to escalate war operations to regime decapitation in the Ukraine. On Monday evening, May 25,  Lavrov telephoned US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and […]

by Editor - Thursday, May 28th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Reading is more effective for understanding Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi than listening. This is because reading uses more of your brain to process the incoming information, compare and fact-check it, than listening or viewing podcasts. American brain scientists report new experiments which prove this. “To mirror the transient nature of […]

by Editor - Wednesday, May 27th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Zugzwang is the position between adversaries when one is forcing the other to make the next move, but whatever move he makes will be his defeat. President Donald Trump (lead image, left) is in it. The only way out for him is to play for time, disguising his predicament with as […]

by Editor - Wednesday, May 27th, 2026
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