by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“We have overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans,” President Vladimir Putin told the Federal Assembly last week. About  the overcoming part, his staff aren’t so sure.

The week before, when asked to identify the guest list at Putin’s annual Christmas reception for the oligarchs on December 25, the president’s spokesman would not acknowledge there was a list, and refused to explain why it hasn’t been published. Publishing the list has been the Kremlin practice since the Christmas-for-oligarch suppers first began five years ago, on December 19, 2014.

In those five years, the President’s efforts to persuade the oligarchs to “de-offshorize” their capital, and repatriate it for reinvestment in Russia, have failed. Follow the details here. The US sanctions against those whom the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)  has judged to be closest to Putin, along with the US Treasury attack on Russian capital throughout the European banking system, have been more effective to that end.  This may be the reason that, not having been overcome, the oligarchs and Putin have agreed that when they keep each other company, it will remain a state secret.

Secret at least from Russians, not from westerners. Between last month’s event and the start this week of the World Economic Forum (WEF) conference in Davos, Switzerland, the oligarchs have been busy advertising themselves in the foreign press. Their message is that they haven’t been overcome, not by the Kremlin and not by OFAC, so it’s back to business as usual.

As usual, the Financial Times is reporting this with the same fervor as has been filling the FT’s coffers and browning the noses of the FT’s Moscow Bureau for almost a quarter of a century. Regime change in the Kremlin, the Japanese-owned London outlet keeps hoping, is still best left to the oligarchs to arrange.

by Editor - Monday, January 20th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In September of 2018, BBC reporter Mark Urban (lead image, left) ended his book The Skripal Files with a report of the favour MI6 had arranged, so that he could visit Sergei Skripal’s house in Salisbury, and report that a souvenir of British country life which MI6 agent Pablo Miller had presented to Skripal after his recruitment as a double agent, was still on a shelf in the living-room. For a double agent, that was a bad slip – not Skripal’s, Urban’s.

by Editor - Sunday, January 19th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In law courts, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. In politics, too.

The problem with what President Vladimir Putin (lead image, right) announced in his Federal Assembly address this week, and what he did immediately after, is that things don’t look the way he says they should.

The difference was written on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s face. He thinks Putin has destroyed the political forces of the candidate with the best chance of winning the presidential election of 2024 — himself. The businessmen and government officials who have depended on Medvedev are acknowledging this realization on the telephone.

by John Helmer - Thursday, January 16th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a ruling issued by the Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley (lead image) this week, the  British Government allegations of a Russian assassination plot against Sergei Skripal by the nerve agent Novichok were repeated and accepted — without the qualification that they have not yet been tested and proven in the coroner’s court.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked in the centre of Salisbury on March 4, 2018. Without mentioning them as material witnesses in his investigation, Ridley has decided that the death of Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, near Salisbury, four months later, was an “unpredictable misfortune”. “On the face of the evidence I have seen,” Ridley said of Sturgess’s death in Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, “[she] appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and her death may well have arisen as a result of ‘collateral damage’, a phrase that I apologise in using but I am unable to express it any other meaningful way.”

By “collateral damage” Ridley meant he doesn’t doubt Sturgess was killed by the same weapon, Novichok, as was used in the attack on the Skripals. Ridley also reports his conclusion that without the police discoveries of perfume bottle evidence in the Sturgess case, there would be no evidence at all of how the Skripals were attacked.

Ridley’s ruling was directed at the London lawyers for the Sturgess family, barrister Michael Mansfield QC and solicitor Irene Nembhard. They have proposed putting Russia’s military intelligence agents and also the British security services on trial in a scheme for a large payout in compensation to the Sturgess family. The lawyers claim the Russian assassination threat was so well-known to the British services, they were negligent in their duty to prevent it and to protect the people of Salisbury, particularly Sturgess.  

Mansfield and Nembhard have been trying to keep this plan secret. They and their office clerks  have repeatedly refused to disclose the documents which Ridley released in part this week. Ridley has also revealed that the two-year delay in holding the inquest into the cause of Sturgess’s death will continue because he “expect[s] this ruling is challenged by way of Judicial Review.”

by Editor - Wednesday, January 15th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow

  @bears_with

A report by a research unit of the German Bundestag, just released in Berlin, has defied the narrative of the European Union, NATO and the US, with the conclusion that since the Ukraine civil war began in early 2014, there has been no reliable evidence of Russian troop invasion or intervention by regular Russian military forces in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

After a review of the press, official public releases and reports, as well as European court rulings, the Bundestag’s experts have described the outcome with the German phrase, ohne belastbares Faktenmaterial – “without reliable fact material.”

The Bundestag report, which runs to 17 pages and was completed on December 9, has been noted in the German-language media. To date, however, it has been ignored by the Anglo-American press, including the alt-media.

by Editor - Tuesday, January 14th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Political fog and the fog of war are different. The first is a way of believing first, seeing afterwards. The second is what happens when the weapons of camouflage and deception  combine with confusion and fear to make seeing clearly impossible.

Follow last week’s events as they happened in Damascus, Istanbul and Tehran.

by Editor - Sunday, January 12th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow

  @bears_with

“From now onwards you tell the truth, and that’s it”, Robert Fisk, one of the few British journalists who do, explained recently for a television documentary that this was the credo he learned from his job.  

He’s still being published in a London newspaper controlled by the Lebedev family;   their capacity for printing lies has not been dissuaded or diminished by Fisk’s example. 

Still,  it’s the time of the year when you and I wish each other the hope that the future will turn out  better than it’s proved to be recently; and when we take time for reflection on the likelihood of this;  also the time to gather the energy to cope with the greater unlikelihood.  

by Editor - Monday, December 23rd, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

During President Vladimir Putin’s four-and-a-half hour press conference on Thursday – the second longest on record in Russia; the longest in the rest of the world — he was congratulated several times by the audience for the answers he gave about the running of Russia. This is a regular feature. Putin’s arranger Dmitry Peskov – his “boss” Putin called him at one point —  didn’t have to try hard to produce it.

After the conference concluded, the president’s critics attacked him for saying nothing new, repeating himself, evading the point of the question,  making promises he doesn’t intend to keep, etc. The critics always say this. It’s their regular feature. This is cyclical, according to one of the Twitter comments. “If there is anyone who wants to watch Putin’s news conference but cannot do it today, don’t worry. Next year you will watch a re-run.”

What was new this time was that in Putin’s performance, he cited 36 sets of state statistics in answer to 55 questions.  Subtracting the time taken by the questioners and Peskov’s audience management, Putin produced the numbers, new sets of them, every five minutes. 

They covered, in his sequence:  climate change; garbage recycling; production capacity;  airports;  highways; farm exports;  mines;  doctors’ pay;  new medical facilities,   vehicles and equipment; heart disease, tuberculosis and child mortality rates;  Ukrainian Army tanks;  Ukrainian gas prices;  Fareast mortgages;  housing replacement;  political party registrations;   inflation;  reserve fund outlays; new rolling stock;  bilateral foreign trade turnover; China’s GDP; loans to Belarus; sanction losses to the European Union; defence spending; robot vehicle kilometre testing; source of migration figures;  historical birth rates; numbers of women of child-bearing age; pharmaceutical exports; life expectancy; environmental technologies; pension growth; and the share capital of Innopraktika, his daughter Yekaterina’s company.

All the data sets were delivered impromptu, unscripted, direct from Putin’s memory.

by Editor - Sunday, December 22nd, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Simon & Schuster is a New York publisher which is now the property of ViacomCBS,  National Amusements Inc., and the part-demented Sumner Redstone (Rothstein). It has long made a business of selling lies about Russia. That’s the non-fiction department.

 It’s a harder sell for the fiction department to do the same.  Martin Cruz Smith’s newest in his series of Russian detective novels comes up with the idea that President Vladimir Putin has ordered the murder of an oligarch challenging him for the presidency, and nearly gets away with liquidating a well-known investigative journalist at the same time.  The dirty deeds done, but the girl safe holding hands with the hero under the Kremlin wall, the book’s last line ends with “the latest coronation. With a fourth term secured, Putin how reigned longer than any ruler since Stalin.”

According to Cruz Smith’s acknowledgement on the next to last page, it was his editor at Simon & Schuster who “came up with excellent ideas for the book and patiently encouraged me to take the time I needed.”

After seven weeks in print, this fabrication hasn’t made it on the New York Times best-seller list yet. It is having to compete with Simon & Schuster’s better selling fiction, seven weeks on the list and going strong at Number 8  —  “The Book of Gutsy Women” by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

by Editor - Wednesday, December 18th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Sergei Skripal (lead image), the central figure in the British Government’s 21-month old story of an attempted assassination by GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, is alive; not very well; and living in England.  

Skripal has revealed himself in three brief telephone calls to his niece Viktoria, living with his mother Yelena in Yaroslavl. The first call took place on April 4 of this year, a year and a month after Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalised in Salisbury, following an alleged poison attack in the centre of the city on March 4, 2018. The second of Sergei’s telephone calls home was on May 9, 2019, when he left a brief recorded message on Viktoria’s telephone; May 9 is celebrated in Russia as Victory Day for the defeat of the enemy in Europe. Skripal’s third call reportedly took place on June 26, following his own and Yulia’s birthdays.

The authenticity of Skripal’s calls, each of them from a different telephone number, has been confirmed by Viktoria. They are the first evidence that he is alive; moreover, that he is well enough to testify about the alleged attack by a nerve agent the British Government has called Novichok.

The evidence of the calls also suggests that Sergei and Yulia Skripal are prevented from communicating freely with their Russian kin, and may be physically under lock and key.

by Editor - Tuesday, December 17th, 2019
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