By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with On March 5, in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), there was a fire-bombing of a French–owned brewery which destroyed 50,000 bottles of beer. On August 23, a private jet of the Wagner Group was bombed in the air north of Moscow, and the Wagner leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with What’s the truth of how Putin rules Russia?   The longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia has followed Putin since their first meeting in St Petersburg in November 1991. This is the Putin story which has taken more than thirty years to prepare. It’s the story which the western and Russian […]

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Doctors in hospitals for the criminally insane have reported that the sharpest pain patients with superiority complexes suffer is the belief there are others who are more superior than they are. Unless they are stopped, they kill to cure. US exceptionalism is a disease of this type.  The American exceptionalists […]

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot […]

by Editor - Thursday, August 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The month of August is for dead-heading the roses, so that there will be fresh blooms before winter. It is the time to charge empty vessels (lead image, rear). Plato was mistaken to claim that empty vessels make the loudest noise; that depends not only on the vessels but on […]

by Editor - Sunday, July 30th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the advertising Hall of Fame, three of the all-time winning slogans are “Just do it”; “Where’s the beef?”; and  “Good to the last drop”.   Three Ukrainian army soldiers and a military press officer from Kiev  have pressed all three on the Financial Times of London, and they just […]

by Editor - Friday, July 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When the Ukrainian and NATO forces have lost their war in eastern Ukraine by Christmas, what will happen to the rump of western Ukraine? The Russian warning, issued last Friday at the Security Council by President Vladimir Putin,  is that the Russian Army will defend western Ukraine, known as Galicia, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, July 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with President Vladimir Zelensky has enough fingers to count that $115 billion is worth almost three times more than $41.3 billion. The first number is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) calculation of  “external support over 2023–27 involving sizable official financing in the form of grants and concessional loans, as well as […]

by Editor - Wednesday, July 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Russia’s warning to Poland not to send troops into the western Galician region of the Ukraine has fallen on deaf ears in Warsaw. Instead, electioneering ahead of an October national parliamentary vote has dictated different priorities for the governing party, the main opposition party, and the rising Konfederacja (“Confederation”) party. […]

by Editor - Monday, July 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Soldiers lay down smoke on the battlefield to conceal their movements, advancing or retreating, from the troops on the other side. In the US Army manuals for warfighting with smoke, there are four kinds for the battlefield (lead image) – obscuring smoke which is aimed at blinding the enemy so […]

by Editor - Sunday, July 23rd, 2023
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