by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

After the Victory Day celebration later this week, President Vladimir Putin has agreed to hold a summit meeting with President Donald Trump. “The Americans have repeatedly asked for a summit and the Kremlin has finally decided,” according to a reliable Moscow source, “that there is no need to spurn the extended hand.”

The source believes Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is the likely location.  Preparatory discussions were held last week in Moscow when Putin telephoned the UAE President, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The Kremlin communiqué claimed “the current state of Russia-UAE relations…constitute a strategic partnership and…enables ongoing dialogue even on the most sensitive international issues.”  That was on May 1. The next day Putin met with Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the President’s sons and his personal security chief, titled deputy prime minister.  

The Moscow source says “the messages have been sent that it will not be a conclusive deal, only a meeting. This is a climb-down from the previous, public Russian position that a lot of work needs to be done first, before a presidential summit,  by specialists. The Russians have understood there are no specialists on the US side yet, and the opportunity is right to shake hands first, then work out the details later.”

The White House press spokesman has announced Trump “will travel to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates [in this order] from May 13th, until May 16th.”  

“It’s a display of the Russian hand of friendship and mutual security,” the Moscow source adds. “The Americans are offering nothing concrete but we believe Trump is disposed to giving Russia the security steps it needs.”

The source says the Kremlin is “neither surprised nor disappointed” at Trump’s May 1 tweet declaring that “many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II.”    “It shows you how foolish the Kremlin faction was which has advocated inviting Trump to Red Square for May 9. Putin will give Trump his PR opportunity – but in the sand, not in Red Square.”

The shift in the Moscow consensus – from resistance on the part of the General Staff, the intelligence agencies, and the Foreign Ministry – has followed remarks by Vice President JD Vance. “It’s going to be up to them [Russia and Ukraine] to come to agreement and stop this brutal, brutal conflict,” he said on Friday (May 2). “It’s not going anywhere right [now]. It’s not going to end any time soon…Look, I am optimistic, but it’s hard to say…confident because the Russians and the Ukrainians – they’re the ones who have to take the final step. We got ‘em talkin’. We got ‘em offering peace proposals. We got the minerals deal done. I think we’re in a place where they’ve got to say we’re done with the fighting…but only Russia and Ukraine can make that decision. That’s not something even President Trump can do for ‘em.”   

In Moscow this is interpreted as acceptance by Washington that the war will continue on Russia’s terms – slow advance westward, no massed offensive – and that it’s now up to “direct” negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to reach an agreement. “This is a double signal prompting Putin”, another Moscow source says, “to agree to a summit meeting with Trump now without preconditions and without pressure to agree on the Kellogg or Witkoff term sheets.  In all likelihood, this will be a feel-good summit. No negotiations at all.”

The source adds a caution. “The planned meeting may be derailed at the last minute if the Ukrainians violate the Victory Day ceasefire [between May 8 and 11], and if Trump is either shown to be incapable of controlling the Kiev regime, or duplicitous in aiding the violations. If the Ukrainians do not observe it, the Russians will hit back hard, very hard, and then ask Trump if he still wants to meet. It might go to the wire.”

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by Editor - Saturday, May 3rd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“When war and revolution come, remember the long years in which the storm was rising, and don’t blame the thunderbolt”.  

That warning appeared in the Chicago Tribune in November 24, 1895. It was written by Clarence Darrow, then a young city lawyer working for railroads and also for unions in the years which followed the bitter, violent battles for limited work hours and higher wages. The Chicago union struggle initiated the May Day strike for protest and celebration between 1881 and 1886.

Today the US is one of the few countries in the world not to recognize the holiday, moving “Labour Day” from the spring to the fall to erase the history.  Darrow (1857-1938) was to become the greatest courtroom lawyer in American history; today he is almost forgotten.

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by Editor - Thursday, May 1st, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Retired US Army General Keith Kellogg, the White House negotiator with the Ukrainian-European alliance, announced yesterday that for the terms of peacemaking on the Ukrainian battlefield,  “the president has this one right on the money, and that’s where we want to go to.”   

Right on the money is exactly where President Donald Trump aims to be – the money of the NATO allies into his pockets and into those of his family, friends, their social clubs and think tanks,  and Trump’s largest campaign contributors.

Listen to the full hour discussion with Chris Cook by clicking here.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, here is the breaking news of the sides in the war changing the appearance of their negotiating positions, starting with President Donald Trump and the reply from President Vladimir Putin.

Click to view: https://www.youtube.com/  

As you listen, here is the  new evidence.

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump has pulled a fast one against the US Constitution, if not quite and  not yet a coup d’état.

“We have an idea of coups being external military assaults on the government,” a US constitutional law professor has reported. “But self-coups take place within the government, from within the executive branch in particular.”

Without the force required for a putsch – not yet, because the Insurrection Act is in Trump’s reserve powers and may be invoked  —  the officials advising Trump’s actions claim Article II of the Constitution    provides him with  “unitary” executive power to freeze or impound funds legislated by the Congress, dismiss state employees, and order the armed services into action.    Since February, the President’s lawyers have prepared for the Supreme Court majority Trump appointed in his first term — and will add to if he can soon —  to rule that “as this Court observed just last Term, Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority”—including the President’s ‘unrestricted power of removal’ with respect to ‘executive officers of the United States whom [the President] has appointed.’ ”  

Last week, in a telephone interview with the Atlantic Monthly, Trump announced: “I run the country and the world”.    In a follow-up face-to-face interview with the magazine on April 24,  Trump told the Kiev regime and its European allies that he was ready to support them but not necessarily to accept that Vladimir Zelensky will continue in office.

He was also telling President Vladimir Putin to accept his terms for ending the war in the Ukraine, and not to tarry at testing his powers to escalate his military support on the Ukrainian battlefield and to add sanctions to stop Russian energy trade between China and India. .

Putin’s reply, announced on Monday (April 28), is a test of Trump’s powers. Declaring a new three-day ceasefire  between May  8 and  11,  Putin said that “in the event of any violations of the ceasefire by the Ukrainian side, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will give a proportionate and efficient response. The Russian side reiterates its willingness to enter peace talks without preconditions, with a view to eliminating the root causes behind the Ukraine crisis and establishing constructive interaction with international partners.”  

In the first sentence,  Putin told Trump to prove he can order the Zelensky regime to obey the ceasefire. If he can’t  —  if there are Ukrainian violations as there have been during the  March 18-April 18 energy infrastructure ceasefire and the April 19-20 Easter ceasefire — Putin is saying that Trump’s term sheet, delivered last Friday by Steven Witkoff,  is worthless.

In his second sentence, Putin told Trump to address the “root causes” with the NATO allies  and other “international partners” by halting the NATO advance eastwards on all fronts, not only in the Ukraine;  and by lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia and its partners since 2014. Without Trump’s demonstration that he controls the other powers, Putin is exposing Trump’s peace proposals as the continuation of war by other means.

Putin’s language was also directed domestically to those of his advisors who have recommended  he accept what they concede to be Trump’s “bad deal”.  

In the Kremlin debate, their reasons are that Russian military forces are unprepared for the offensive to achieve the Kiev regime’s capitulation; that the splitting between the US and the European powers has never been so favourable to Russian interests; that the Russian oligarchs want a return to business as usual; and because the intelligence assessment of Trump is so unstable,  there is no telling what war plans Washington will follow in the sequence they have been signalling.  

Retired Army General Keith Kellogg, who has retained his presidential appointment because he reflects powerful elements inside Trump’s circle, has dismissed Putin’s response.

“A three-day ceasefire is absurd,” Kellong told the  White House outlet Fox News on Tuesday (April 29).  “What the president wants is a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire — sea, air, land, infrastructure — for a minimum of 30 days, and then we can extend that.” Referring to what he said is Ukrainian agreement to a 22-point term sheet negotiated with the Europeans last week, Kellogg added: “When it comes to the Ukrainians, I’m very comfortable with where we are at right now…Russia is not winning this war. Russia has not made major advances in the last year and a half. They have not taken the city of Kiev, the capital. They haven’t pushed to the west of the Dnieper River, which is a major obstacle. They haven’t taken Odessa… They haven’t really moved anything. They’ve moved by metres, not by miles…President Trump has it exactly right, and where he wants to get to…The president has this one right on the money, and that’s where we want to go to.”

Before the podcast discussion later today with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern,  follow the seven  charts. Take note of the last one – this shows that despite growing disapproval by US voters of the President’s performance in office,  most Americans think Trump’s policy towards Russia is “too friendly”. This sentiment is holding strong at all education levels, for blacks and Hispanics, and across all age groups, except for the middle-aged (50-64). The most anti-Russian Americans recorded in this new poll appear to be Harris voters and black protestants.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is not the comedy of the two Odessa conmen who travel across the Soviet Union trying to find a cache of jewellery hidden in twelve chairs, written in 1928. In the end, one murders the other, and then when he discovers the treasure has already been found and spent, he goes mad.  

This is President Donald Trump’s comedy of the three chairs which were reduced to two so that, in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Trump could sit on one and Vladimir Zelensky on the other. Trump’s plan, however, was that no one should laugh at his con.  Murder and madness may still materialize.  

Yesterday,  Secretary of State Marco Rubio was sent to explain that at the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump wanted the cameras to record him as the peacemaker of the world. “We want the war to end,” Rubio told a Sunday television show. “You saw yesterday at the Pope’s mass there was talk about war and how it needed to stop.  The Pope – the late Pope was celebrated for being a peacemaker and trying to talk about these things.  We should all be happy that we have a president of the United States in Donald J. Trump who wants to end and prevent wars, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The comedy of four men – Trump, Zelensky, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — competing for just two chairs in front of dozens of cameras for millions of viewers  says otherwise. It reveals that between end-of-war on Russia’s terms and peace on their terms, they don’t know what President Vladimir Putin will agree to.

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by Editor - Sunday, April 27th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a good reason that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and it has nothing to do with heredity, dendrology, or gravity. The reason is that trees understand the further away the apple is dropped, the easier it is to steal.

This is understood by the oligarchs who compose influential factions around President Donald Trump in Washington and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In the end-of-war negotiations Trump has tweeted to be “close to a deal” on April 23,   again on April 25,  then “very close to a deal” on April 26,  the oligarch representative and deal negotiator for the US side is Steven Witkoff; his counterpart on the Russian side is Kirill Dmitriev.

It cannot be Trump’s ambition to emulate predecessor George Washington’s truth-telling in the story of his hatchet and the apple (cherry) tree.   This is because from his boyhood Trump was encouraged by his father to lie in order to get the better of his brothers and sisters for their father’s favour.  

Instead, it is Trump’s ambition — also his innovation in presidential politics — to adapt the century-old US empire’s war for hegemony in Europe against Russia by compelling both his allies in the war (Germany first of all, then France, Poland, UK), and his war targets (Russia and the Ukraine), to pay him for protection against the enemy he claims to be making peace with.  A short-term armistice or truce on the Ukraine border, accompanied by a long-term war plan that preserves the US protectorate in Europe, at the Europeans’ expense, serves the president’s personal ambition, and also the strategy which has been written for him by his advisors.   

“A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine,” Trump tweeted a few hours after Witkoff had left the Kremlin on Friday afternoon.  “They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’ Most of the major points are agreed to. Stop the bloodshed, NOW. We will be wherever is necessary to help facilitate the END to this cruel and senseless war!”

This was false, as the texts of the US end-of-war terms and of the Anglo-French and German term sheet, released by Reuters on April 25, reveal.

A text of the Ukrainian term sheet,  published by the New York Times later the same day, adds provisions which “could be nonstarters for the Kremlin”, the newspaper reports: “there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, ‘a European security contingent’ backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war…Ukraine’s accession to NATO depends on consensus among the Alliance’s members….Territorial issues could be discussed after the full and unconditional cease-fire.”  

Term sheets are bids, they are not deals. In making the former appear to be the latter, Trump’s appeal is to those who believe they can all shake Trump’s war-making money tree and make money for themselves in the short run. This is standard dendrology – trees usually fruit only once in a season.

The Dmitriev faction in Russia, says a Moscow source, believes Putin should give Trump a  short-term armistice of forces in place in the Ukraine in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against Russian reserves, current trade and investment, and resumption of the export of oligarch capital which Putin and his former Finance Minister and candidate prime minister Alexei Kudrin,  and Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina have directed since Putin’s term began. “It’s a perfect three year pause in fighting,” the source commented following Witkoff’s meeting at the Kremlin on Friday with Putin, Dmitriev and Yury Ushakov, Putin’s assistant. “Come 2028, if  Trump loses, the  war will start all over again, but the Russians will get it right. For now it’s very obvious Trump has no one he trusts in CIA, State and Pentagon to implement his terms. So Putin will get the most he can and do the deal. He should.”

A second Russian source confirms: “I believe a bad deal is coming, but we are clear-eyed about this. There will be a ceasefire, but how long it lasts, who can tell.  This isn’t a sell-out. We have no illusions about the reliability of American agreements or Trump’s stability. Putin is telling the General Staff: we’ve got to sign something — prepare for war. He’s also got to convince Russians of this for the longer term. In this future, the pre-war oligarchs haven’t the power of the new military-industrial complex. They will profit by going along. They realize that if they don’t,  Putin’s successor is coming, and he won’t be as friendly to them.”

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by Editor - Saturday, April 26th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In Shelley’s most famous poem, the relics are described of Ozymandias, the ancient ruler with his “sneer of cold command” and his ill-fated power projection:  

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Wess Mitchell, whose grand strategy for Trump was announced this week in Foreign Affairs, the platform of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, places Trump among the rulers of ancient Sparta, then beside Metternich and Bismarck, in expanding his empire while avoiding  “delusions of grandeur”.  

Trump’s first target is the Kremlin, Mitchell has reported, not to make peace but to neutralize  Russia, while Trump swings his guns around to aim at China.

“Today, the weaker rival is Russia. This has become all too obvious as Ukraine has chewed through Moscow’s military resources. The United States should thus aim to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a détente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing. The goal should be not to remove the sources of conflict with Russia but to place constraints on its ability to harm U.S. interests. This process should begin by bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that is favorable to the United States.”

In this new podcast with Dimitri Lascaris, the two legs of the Ozymandias strategy are analyzed – the correlation of political and military forces in Europe and Asia, as Trump and his men calculate their strength;  and the money they are counting to earn themselves from the rearmament of Germany, Japan and other allies whom they plan to supply.

The miscalculation in this strategy is that it concedes that Russia is now stronger on the Ukrainian battlefield than the US and its forces; likewise, China is stronger now for a special military operation in Taiwan than the US and its allies aim to be in a few years’ time. The conclusion is plain – Russia’s security interests in Europe dictate accelerating its westward drive across the Ukraine, while China’s security interests are best served by moving against Taiwan sooner, not later.

As the podcast also reveals, so long as they can pocket billion-dollar riches now, which their placemen at the Pentagon, US Treasury and Department of Commerce are fixing, Trump and his men can afford to ignore the outcome for Ozymandias in the long term.

This is the  strategy of fighting one war at a time while making lots of money in the meantime. In tactics it relies on the operations of fraud ahead of the operations of force, and counts on the power of propaganda to convince the world that all Trmup wants is for the killing to stop.  

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by Editor - Friday, April 25th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In this new podcast the word that podcasters are afraid to say aloud, for fear of sounding “lunatic leftists” – Donald Trump’s phrase – is imperialism. Listen to the presentation with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern here and for the compelling evidence, read on.

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by Editor - Thursday, April 24th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Yevgeny Krutikov is a former Russian military intelligence officer in the Balkans who now writes politico-military and intelligence analyses for Vzglyad.  Because of the intention of his  sources and their target audience, Krutikov’s papers are more a bellwether of formed policy thinking than influencer of policy decisions yet to be made.

Krutikov is also an Afrikaans-speaking specialist on Africa, a bird fancier, and a pin-up devotee. His posts of birds and girls appear regularly in his Telegram channel Mudraya Ptitsa  (lead images).*

Krutikov has just published a report entitled “How will the reform of the State Department affect Russia’s interests”.   This is an analysis of a New York Times publication of the day before, reporting the leak of a “draft of a Trump administration executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department”. The US newspaper concluded: “It was not immediately clear who had compiled the document or what stage of internal debates over a restructuring of the State Department it reflected. It is one of several recent documents proposing changes to the department, and internal administration conversations take place daily on possible actions. Some of the ideas have been debated among U.S. officials in recent weeks, though it is unclear to what degree they would be adopted or how active the draft is, officials said.”  

In Krutikov’s analysis, there are two conclusions of fact expressed ideologically, the first leading to the second. In contrast to “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power”,  “the key moment for maintaining tension between the United States and Russia was precisely the imposition of ‘values’ artificially invented by America on the whole world. The withdrawal from the diplomatic practice of ‘promoting democracy’ and the liberal-leftist agenda is in itself a positive phenomenon…This environment consists almost entirely of liberals and leftists, and Trumpists are rare there. Consequently, there is simply no one to formulate new principles of foreign policy in a concentrated form.”

Neither of these answers directly the question of Russians interests which Krutikov posed in the title. They can be inferred in a third, implied conclusion: the “liberal agenda” and “leftist ideology” are anathema to Russian interests — because they are in retreat in Washington and absent in Moscow, and because “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power” is shared by the Russians, the end-of-war terms the Trump Administration is proposing do not threaten Russian interests.  

The Russian text has been translated verbatim without editing, illustration, reference, or clarification.

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025
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