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 real goal is to have a place in the centre of world finances, a place that is already occupied. They want to push away representatives of Jewish capital or, if not, they will try to destroy the centre and shake it up and, ultimately, in that way to take its place. The reason for the terrorism isn’t the Middle East or poverty. They use poverty and they use unresolved conflicts. They are using other problems. These problems are not the real reasons for terrorism…I raised this not just to support you, but to say that we all have fight in the same world.”
By Jewish capital, Putin was repeating the line he remembered from his Marxist-Leninist textbooks in which the capital of Russia’s enemies in Europe and the US was inter-connected and in which the ideology of religion always reflected the underlying class struggle between capital and labour. So far as is known, Putin hasn’t acknowledged as much at his meetings with Steven Witkoff (lead image left, with Kirill Dmitriev) and Jared Kushner. Nor has he said that the US-directed attacks on the Russian hinterland, including his own residence in Novgorod, are anything but terrorism.
Putin has also not described the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza as an enterprise of Jewish capitalism on to whose board of directors, the Board of Peace (BOP), Putin was recently invited to sit by the chairman, President Donald Trump. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has advertised the invitation which has been sent to more than fifty countries. “President Putin has indeed received an offer through diplomatic channels to join this Board of Peace. We are currently studying all the details of this proposal. We hope to contact the US side to clarify all the details.”
This wasn’t a Russian nyet. It wasn’t the explicit endorsement of Trump’s invitation as a political compliment – the line Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko took when he received his summons and accepted with alacrity, claiming it was US “recognition of Belarus’s international standing and Lukashenko’s personal role.”
When Peskov was asked again, he said it is still “premature” to say Putin will join the BOP. “We do not yet know all of the details regarding the initiative on this board, whether it concerns only Gaza or includes a broader context,” he said. “There are a lot of questions about this initiative so far, and we hope to receive answers during contacts with the Americans.” A Moscow supporter of the Kremlin has claimed Putin’s acceptance could be “for the simple purpose of not wanting to provoke Trump by risking him being offended by Putin’s rejection of his invitation into escalating. A supplementary motive could be that this is a political insurance policy in the scenario, however far-fetched it might seem, that the Board of Peace ultimately de facto replaces some of the UN’s functions.”
In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid in Teheran, the focus is on the evidence of Russian responses to Trump’s moves from Putin, his Kremlin advisors, the General Staff, and the Foreign Ministry. The big question, illustrated with tables, maps and charts, is whether Russia is capable of projecting the military dominance it has won in the Ukraine to the new battlefields and fronts Trump and the European allies are opening from the Caribbean to the Atlantic, from Cuba to Greenland.
The corollary, also discussed, is whether Putin will decide to advance his military power, temporize, or retreat, according to the interpretation of the allies, China, Iran, and India.
A well-informed Moscow source warns against exaggerating Trump’s exceptionalism. “I think Trump’s aggression is a repeat of George Bush Junior’s aggression, which was followed by Obama’s proxy wars and regime changes. All of that followed the wars of Bush Senior and Clinton, Serbia in particular. We don’t let Trump’s ego blind us to the continuity of American neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism in full force. The chances of a direct military conflict between the US and Europe are exaggerated. In reality, they will realign together in their common war against Russia. Their public rhetoric and propaganda are a matter of timing in the election cycles.”
GREENLAND AS US BASE FOR ATTACKING THE ARCTIC SEA LANES FOR RUSSIAN TRADE
Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/01/greenland-and-irrational-responses-to-the-crisis-of-capital-accumulation.html Read more here for details of the US corporate constituencies which are lobbying for Trump’s takeover of Greenland. For more on escalation of the US and NATO war against the Russian tanker fleet, read:
https://gcaptain.com/italy-seizes-ship-over-russian-steel-cargo-linked-to-novorossiysk/ and https://gcaptain.com/germany-denies-baltic-sea-entry-to-shadow-fleet-tanker-tavian-in-unprecedented-move/ The first public advocacy to appear in Moscow for escalating Russia’s military response to the fleet attacks appeared in Vzglyad on January 20. “Only the [Russian] navy can protect tankers and bulk carriers from capture at sea. And it has to be ready to take the fight there…Here it is worth remembering that Iran freed its tanker and did it in such a way that the British did not touch Iranian tankers any longer. The Iranians simply began seizing tankers owned by companies with British capital, and did so until their own tanker was released. They found a way out of the situation. Russia will also need to do this.”
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/treasury-secretary-bessent-tariffs-national-emergency-greenland-eu-rcna254650 US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explaining the place of Greenland in long-term US strategy: ““Best outcome is for the US to receive or maintain control over Greenland: “Down the road, this fight for the Arctic is real. If there were an attack on Greenland from Russia, from some other area, we would get dragged in. So better now, peace through strength, make it part of the United States. We are the strongest country in the world. The Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength,” he added, arguing that European countries had shown they were “unable to push back against Russia” in Ukraine. According to Bessent, European leaders would ultimately “come around” to accept the US position and the need to remain under Washington’s security umbrella, pointing again to the Ukraine crisis. “What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out? The whole thing would collapse,” he said, calling the choice between Greenland and NATO a “false” one.
CAN THE PYGMY NEGOTIATE WITH THE GIANTS? KIRILL DMITRIEV GOES TO DAVOS
Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) which Dmitriev heads, currently controls about $10 billion in funds, most of them pledged by the Arab states – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. China trails behind. It is unclear from the open source reports how much cash has actually been received by RDIF from these sources since Dmitriev announced he had negotiated the pledges.
Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/largest-sovereign-wealth-funds-in-the-world/ and https://www.swfinstitute.org/fund-rankings/sovereign-wealth-fund The Central Bank of Russia is the much larger wealth fund of Russia than RDIF: https://globalswf.com/ranking It is the only sovereign fund to have allowed its assets to be seized and frozen by US and NATO action.
THE REAL POLITICS OF REALISM IS COUNTING MONEY, VOTES AND BULLETS
Source: https://markets.ft.com/data/indices/tearsheet/summary?s=FTWIDEU502010S:FSI
Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating
RUSSIAN VOTERS INCREASE SUPPORT FOR A STRONG HAND SO LONG AS IT WINS ON THE BATTLEFIELD AND ISN’T CORRUPT AT HOME
Source: https://www.levada.ru/2026/01/20/massovye-predstavleniya-o-neobhodimosti-vlastnogo-rukovoditelya-silnoj-ruki-dekabr-2025/ “Most Russians, 63%, believe that our people constantly need a ‘strong hand’. The proportion with this opinion continues to grow -- an increase of 15 percentage points since November 2020. In December 2025 it reached its maximum value since polling on this question began in 1990.”
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