by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On January 17, when the Presidents of Russia and Iran, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian,  signed the Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation,  they were standing at the front of a line of Russian and Iranian (Persian) tsars, shahs, generals, ministers, and ambassadors stretching back for two hundred years.

Putin and Pezeshkian are the novices, the new names. Their predecessors on the Russian side include Tsars Alexander 1 and Nicholas I, Ambassador Alexander Griboyedov (lead image, top left), General Alexei Yermolov (top, right), Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Yevgeny Primakov. The new document must be understood in the context of the precedents these Russian leaders have made in making war and also in making peace with Iran over this long period.

Interpreting what the 47 articles of the new treaty mean to the Russian and the Iranian sides, and also to the US, Israel, the UK and the NATO allies, all states at war with both Russia and Iran – for them the treaty was also composed and signed in English – requires understanding how the terms of the new pact deal with the longstanding suspicions the Russians have of the Iranians, and vice versa, and protect each other from the warmaking threats they face separately, and also together.

In this 200-year history, Moscow’s Griboyedov  line (negotiation) and Yermolov line (force) have changed their practical application towards Teheran many times over. These lines, and the officials advocating them, clashed in the recent debate in Moscow between the General Staff, the Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin over whether to deter, to oppose, or to allow the Turkish-led attack on Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, and the partition of Syria.  

The crucial reassurance between Moscow and Teheran is in Article 3. “In the event that either Contracting Party is subject to aggression, the other Contracting Party shall not provide any military or other assistance to the aggressor which would contribute to the continued aggression, and shall help to ensure that the differences that have arisen are settled on the basis of the United Nations Charter and other applicable rules of international law.”  

To Pezeshkian and Ebrahim Raisi, the predecessor who negotiated the treaty terms from 2021 until his death in May 2024, this means that Putin will not directly or indirectly assist Israel, and behind Israel the US, to attack Iran; assassinate its commanders;  and destroy its defences, including its nuclear and conventionally armed missile forces. To Putin, Article 3 means that Pezeshkian will not directly or indirectly assist the Americans, Turks, Azeris, Georgians, Armenians and anti-Russian groups they sponsor to attack Russia, especially in the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region.

For the time being then, Article 3 means different things to the two sides. It is also not new – the very same Article 3 was signed 24 years ago as the “Treaty on the basis for mutual relations and the principles of cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation”. This was signed under President Putin on March 12, 2001.    The enemies of Russia and Iran in Washington and Tel Aviv have interpreted this identicality between the two treaties to signal that Iran and Russia have been unable to agree on more explicit mutual defence and security provisions, and that mutual suspicion remains their vulnerability.

In today’s hour-long podcast, Nima Alkhorshid and John Helmer open for discussion the contentious dimensions of Russian policy towards Iran, the Arab states, Israel,  and the US – topics which have not been discussed in such detail in the media or the think tanks of either country since the treaty was signed.

The discussion also comes with an explicit warning against media interpretations which are as racist in their denigration of the Arabs and the Iranians as the American, European and Ukrainian warfighters are racist in their targeting of Russia and the Russians.

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by Editor - Tuesday, February 4th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was asked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence what she thought of Russia Today (RT), she replied: “RT News is a propaganda arm of the Russian state government and is not a reliable source of objective news reporting.”   

This was one of the few unequivocal responses Gabbard gave to the hostile questioning she faced from the Russia warfighters on the Intelligence Committee last week.   

She also implied – but stopped short of saying — that if a news medium, publication, tweet, or podcast is paid for by a government or one of its agencies – any government, any medium including the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation — it follows that whatever is reported is state propaganda, so its truth value is zero and should be dismissed. This is the 400-year old maxim that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

It’s not the rule for truth-telling which the Anglo-American courts observe – beyond reasonable doubt for capital crimes, balance of probabilities for civil offences.  It is also not the rule of truth-telling in politics the world over. “It was worthwhile making sure of your potential friends,” the English science official and novelist C.P. Snow put into the mouth of an ambitious cabinet minister he knew in London a half-century ago. “As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your friends.”

In the present information war accompanying the military and economic campaigns against Russia, Snow’s rule should be understood to mean that telling the truth isn’t going to win over the enemy. Gabbard’s condemnation of RT at the Senate is a proof of that.  Snow’s rule is also a warning that truth-telling risks alienating your allies – particularly those allies competing for reward from the Pied Piper.

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by Editor - Monday, February 3rd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In our first appearance together on Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid opens the discussion of how Russia is taking its fight to President Donald Trump – the best enemy Russia has ever had  in the long US war because he is imperialist in ideology, pathological in mentality,  and altogether predictable. (He is also 15 centimetres taller than Adolf Hitler.)

As this phase of the war comes out in the open after months of secret negotiations, President Vladimir Putin is obliged to address the revolutionary moment for the country — a 100-year war with the US, according to former president Dmitry Medvedev; the General Staff consensus for a campaign of acceleration, decapitation, and mobilization; and the efforts of the domestic oligarchs to block nationalization and capital controls,  and to preserve their economic dominance and political power.

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 29th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Over-confidence in the face of the adversary can be the death of kings.

In the two great battles whose outcomes turned a small, defensive Anglo-Saxon island into an offensive global empire, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Battle of Bosworth Field of 1485, the ruling English kings, Harold Godwinson and Richard III, launched downhill cavalry charges which almost overpowered the invading forces; almost reached the challengers William of Normandy and Henry Tudor; almost killed them. But Harold and Richard were killed instead; their kingdoms were captured.

The lesson of those two cavalry charges led from the front by Harold and Richard has been erased in the story-telling which followed their deaths by the propagandists of William and Henry.

In the present battles with the US and the NATO allies on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russians could provide an object lesson to the Danes on what they should expect to be done to them by President Donald Trump as he rushes to capture Greenland, confident that the threat of his charge will be enough to force the Danes to surrender, the Greenlanders to capitulate

Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen heard it for herself. “It was horrendous,” said one of the sources in Copenhagen after she and Trump had spoken by telephone last week.  Another source has added: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous…It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs.”  This was what was heard and reported to a London newspaper. Prime Minister Fredericksen was shy; she told the Financial Times she does: “not recognise the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources”.  

Officially, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman has declared Russia to be against both Fredericksen and Trump.

Their claims, Maria Zakharova said last Thursday,   “neglect the crux of the issue.” That, she explained, is the concerted Danish campaign to destroy the indigenous identity, culture, and reproduction of the Inuit Greenlanders, combined with the theft and poisoning of their land by US nuclear bomber and submarine bases. “Given the extensive history of colonial exploitation by Denmark and the United States, it is unsurprising that Greenland seeks independence and the establishment of a sovereign state,” Zakharova said.  

No Russian currently engaged in the serious fighting against the US believes in displaying  enthusiasm for either the cavalry charge  or the parley.  Instead, the Russians are preparing to fight Trump’s Greenland move as the opening of a new front to attack Russia from the north.

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by Editor - Monday, January 27th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise

If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise

For every oligarch there ever was

Will gather there for certain because

Today’s the day the oligarchs have their picnic.

Every oligarch who’s been good is sure of a treat today

There’s lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play

Beneath the trees where nobody sees

They’ll hide and seek as long as they please

That’s the way the oligarchs have their picnic.

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by Editor - Thursday, January 23rd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

No government can survive when it fails to control the cost in blood on the battlefield and the cost of potatoes, butter and bread on the home front. The combination at the same time is politically lethal.

US President Lyndon Johnson learned this between 1965 and 1968, when the rate of domestic inflation was quadrupling and the Killed in Action (KIA) numbers in the Vietnam War jumped ninefold. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential election later that year.*

President Vladimir Putin has managed the KIA half of the lethal equation by fighting a limited expeditionary campaign in the Ukraine, restricting the General Staff’s resources, plans, targets and operations;  attacking with standoff, mostly airborne weapons;  shifting the casualty burden of ground fighting to socially marginal groups; and keeping the majority of voters out of the line of fire. His success is in high and stable voter support.  

For the time being, the president has escaped public blame for the inflationary surge in food prices over 2024. According to one report,  beets were up by 71%; potatoes by 65.4%; eggs by 48.5%; garlic by 41%; salt by 27%; vegetable oil by 24%; butter by 22%. According to the AB Centre calculation, the price of potatoes jumped 65.2%; olive oil, 35.5%; butter, 35.2%; garlic, 24.7%; beets, 22.7%.    

The state statistics agency Rosstat claims that the overall, official inflation rate for the country was 8.6% for 2024, while retail food price inflation, according to Rosstat was 9.5%. No one believes this, according to consumer polling and expert analyses. Consumer anticipation and expert forecasts are for the surge in food prices to continue this year at rates, depending on the food item, of between 50% and 100%.   

Sergei Glazyev, a well-known public economist, presidential candidate in 2004, and a senior official of the Eurasian Economic Commission,  is blunt on his attack. “Rising prices are hitting everyone’s pockets and making everyone poorer. Both citizens and businesses. Only banks are swollen with money.     

“The Bank of Russia’s policy is driving the economy into a stagflationary trap, in which falling production, devaluation of the ruble and rising inflation are mutually reinforcing: an increase in the key rate [21%] compresses production lending, which leads to lower volumes and higher production costs, the technical level and production efficiency decline, the competitiveness of the economy decreases, which is offset by the devaluation of the ruble. That then causes a new surge of inflation, which the Bank of Russia is trying to pay off with another increase in the key rate. After ten years of ineffectual targeting of inflation, it is clear that the continuation of this insane policy has no prospects.” https://t.me/glazieview/6705 

Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, is just as scathing. He says the official rate of inflation for 2024 was not 8.5%, as the government insists, but closer to 19%; he warns it may reach 29% this year. The Central Bank interest rate of 21% is to blame:  “this, in my opinion, is more destructive than the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But there is some good news. If tactical nuclear weapons are suddenly used against us, it will certainly be a severe shock and many people will die, but for the economy as a whole it will not be a greater shock than the policy of Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina. And [Finance Minister] Anton Germanovich Siluanov, who should also not be forgotten.”   

“However, as we know, at the December 20 [2024] meeting,  the Central Bank did not raise the key rate to 23 percent once again, as many, including me, expected. This is probably a good signal, because by raising the key rate in conditions of a shortage of money supply, the Bank of Russia thereby accelerates inflation. So far, Elvira Sakhipzadovna has refused to further accelerate inflation, but there is no guarantee that she will not return to this practice at the beginning of next year.”  

So serious has been the failure of Central Bank Governor Nabiullina  to halt inflation, and so widespread is public suspicion of her competence and intentions, on January 13 the Central Bank issued a public release denying that Nabiullina is planning a freeze on Russian individual savings by blocking withdrawals from bank accounts. “It is quite obvious that in any market economy, of which bank lending is an integral part, such a step is unthinkable,” the Central Bank has announced on Telegram.  “Firstly, it will immediately undermine confidence in the banking system and put an end to lending to the economy. Secondly, freezing deposits will not help reduce inflation. People will rush to invest money not in deposits, but in goods and real estate with the corresponding sad consequences for rising prices.”  

National polling of public attitudes towards leading officials has never identified Nabiullina positively. In open-ended questioning of those whom voters trust, Nabiullina’s name has not come up.  Instead, she appears fifteenth on the countrywide list of officials and politicians who are distrusted – she ranks equal to the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov; State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, and the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.  

No critic of the domestic inflation and Central Bank policy mentions President Putin. He is understood, however, to be Nabiullina’s protector against her domestic critics.  In the past month, however, he has been pressed to qualify this.

At his press conference on December 19, the day before the Central Bank met to decide whether to raise the interest rate to 23%,  Putin said: “Only yesterday, while preparing for today’s event, I talked to the Central Bank Governor, and Elvira Nabiullina told me that the inflation rate has already reached about 9.2–9.3 percent year-to-date. That said, salaries have increased by 9 percent, and I am talking about an increase in real terms, minus inflation. In addition, disposable incomes have also increased. So, the overall situation is stable and, let me reiterate, solid.”  

The Kremlin record claims there has been no official meeting between Putin and Nabiullina since September 2019.  

At his December press conference, Putin acknowledged “there are certain challenges with inflation and with the economy heating up. Therefore, the Government and the Central Bank have been seeking to ensure a soft landing.” Asked by a reporter what the interest rate decision would be, Putin added: “she does not tell me what the rate will be. Perhaps she does not know this yet, because they discuss it at the board meeting, their Komsomol cell, and make the final decision in the course of the discussion. I hope that it will be balanced and will meet today’s requirements.”

“Balance” is Putin’s term for satisfying each of his oligarch, military, and voter constituencies at the same time as they contradict and oppose each other. 

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In anticipation of the start of end-of-war negotiations between President Donald Trump’s retired general Keith Kellogg and the Kremlin, Dmitri Rogozin has proposed three fresh principles for the Russian outcome – acceleration, decapitation, mobilization.

Since 1996 Rogozin is the longest running contestant for the Russian presidency — longer running than Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Medvedev, Sergei Glazyev, or Alexei Kudrin; only the serial loser, Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party,  has been running for longer.

At 61, Rogozin is eleven years younger than President Putin, two years older than ex-president  Medvedev, and more than ten centimetres taller than both of them. If sources for Kremlin election strategy are to be believed, the most likely vote-getter to succeed if Putin retires in 2030 will be recruited from the Time of Heroes legion who are being placed into political circulation each December since the Special Military Operation (SVO) began.  

With a family of Russian military leaders extending from the 13^th and 17^th centuries to his father,  two doctorates, and state service as Putin’s ambassador to NATO, deputy prime minister for the military industrial complex, and  head of the Russian space conglomerate Roskosmos, Rogozin is a unique figure in current politics. As the sitting senator for Zaporozhye region engaged in running an active military unit on the front, Rogozin is combining the military and civilian qualifications for the succession.

He has also remained relatively free of oligarch ties; his line on domestic economic planning and investment priorities is anti-oligarch and war mobilizational alongside Glazyev  and Mikhail Delyagin.   Not even the hit jobs organized by political rivals like Alexei Navalny  and the Kiev regime,  have been able to silence or kill him.  

Rozogin’s principles of war policy are acceleration on the offensive; decapitation of Vladimir Zelensky; and comprehensive militarization of the Russian domestic economy.

Last week in a nationally circulated press interview, he called for “victory so that the armed conflict ends faster, so that we can begin a peaceful life faster…The war changes every three months. It becomes impossible to fight in the old way. New means of destruction are emerging. We must keep in mind that here we are fighting against the entire military-industrial complex of the Western countries — they are testing their weapons on us. Therefore, not only do we have no right to lag behind, we must be ahead of the curve.”

“We need solidarity of the rear and the front. Moscow, St. Petersburg, other major Russian cities should stop living their carefree life, pretending that nothing is happening. We will never return to the state that was until 2022. Never. Everyone needs to understand that. Society must understand the depth of the problem and help the army with everything it can. Only victory will bring an end to the conflict. The war cannot be frozen. Or else the war will be inherited by our children and grandchildren.”

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by Editor - Monday, January 20th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There was a time when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was President of Iran (1989-97) and he despatched from his personal office secret intelligence-gatherers to Moscow. That was during the Yeltsin administration, when there was no love lost for Iran inside the Kremlin wall. So Rafsanjani’s advisors came under cover of merchants selling the pistachios of which Iran is the world’s largest and best producer.

I remember meeting them at the old Peking Hotel. They were good listeners; I don’t recall their saying anything except to ask questions. To our meetings they brought presentation boxes of finely roasted pistachios.  

From Rafsanjani’s men in those days I learned that the best way of understanding what Iranians are thinking about the Kremlin is not to ask questions, which they invariably evade and obfuscate in answer. It’s in the questions they ask that the clues will be found to Iran’s objectives, priorities, and also their uncertainties, vulnerabilities.

At the conclusion of the new President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian’s meetings with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Friday, there was a brief, carefully staged exchange of questions and answers between the presidents and the press   — two Iranian questions, two Russian ones. Just twenty minutes were allowed.

The Iranian questions started from the obvious fact that both Iran and Russia are presently defending themselves from the long US war to destroy them both — through Israel for Iran, through the Ukraine for Russia. The Iran reporters asked two questions making the same point about the present war:   “What will happen in the future with the current agreement?” “What will be the policy of the two countries regarding the international agenda, as well as regional cooperation, especially in our region? How can all this be translated into practice?”

President Putin avoided speaking of the war; the Russian reporters followed suit.  Interfax asked about the gas business; Izvestia sidestepped with a fatuity: “With such constant turbulence in the same Middle East, how can the balance of power be maintained?”

Pezeshkian was more explicit than Putin. “You see in what is taking place in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza Strip, that the bloodshed is endless. You all have seen this with your own eyes…These double standards are intolerable to us… today’s agreements…ensure that the unipolar world will no longer dictate our course. No double standards can govern the world.”  

“When discussing recent developments in Syria,” Putin said, “we emphasised that Russia remains committed to comprehensive settlement in that country based on respect for its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. We stand ready to continue providing the Syrian people with the necessary support for stabilising the situation, to offer urgent humanitarian aid, and to start full-scale post-conflict reconstruction…we sincerely wish that the Syrian people will successfully overcome all the emerging challenges posed by the current transition period.”  

More concrete answers are to be found in the forty-seven articles of the pact which the two presidents had just signed. Titled the “Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation”, three originals were signed – in Russian, Persian, and English. Exceptionally, on its last line the pact declares “that all texts [are] equally authentic,“ but that “in case of any disagreement in interpretation or implementation of this Treaty, the English text shall be used.”

No historical precedent can be found in which two allied states have agreed with each other to apply in this way the language of their common enemy.

In the English version of the new treaty it is also evident how the Russians and Iranians have left out what they failed to agree to say or do towards that enemy.  Read carefully, just six weeks after the two presidents did not agree on military cooperation to stop the Turkish, Israeli and American invasions of Syria and its partition,  this looks to one military observer as “a declaration of maybe — we promise to be nice to each other, when possible, perhaps.”

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by Editor - Sunday, January 19th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.

No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.

About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents”  issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.

The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”

In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning.  Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London.  A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.  

But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war,  this hasn’t happened.

The new book, Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the worldis the lone voice to explain  for the time being at least;  it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.

For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.

In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.  

The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.  

For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story;  and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.  

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by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Novichok is the notorious warfighting poison which has killed no one but fooled everyone.

At least that’s how British Government officials, their scientists, chemical warfighters, policemen, media reporters, and trailing after them all, their judges, intend the story to be told. 

Theirs is the story of the assassination, ordered by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and attempted on March 4, 2018, by two military officers tracked and filmed to every location but not  the murder scene; with a weapon not detected at the scene nor in the blood streams and bodily tissues of their murder targets.  

The victims, Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal, have been made to disappear and are either incommunicado in prison or dead.  The only direct testimony which has been recorded voluntarily in front of witnesses was given by Yulia Skripal, in hospital four days after the attack, when she identified the assassination attempt as having been carried out with poison spray by an attacker who was not Russian, just minutes before she and her father collapsed. She meant the poison was British; the assassin British.  

The motive for the Novichok crime turns out to be hearsay by British government against the Russian government.  

In political and military terms, the Novichok poison story is propaganda between enemies at war. Judgement of what happened to the Skripals is a weapon of this war. And so it has turned out that there has been no court trial or test of the Novichok narrative, according to British law. Instead, there has been a proceeding which looked like a court trial but wasn’t; in which the Skripals were represented by police interrogators and by lawyers who said nothing; presided over by a judge who wasn’t.

In other words, a show trial in a time of war.

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 14th, 2025
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