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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There is a fraction of the Germans who, when speaking or writing in public, consider themselves the good Germans. Good Germans are to Germany as propaganda is to truth – negligibly fractional; sometimes truth-telling; always irrelevant to the outcome of the wars which Germany wages.

The political comprehension of the Germans — to adapt Mao Zedong’s axiom that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun — only comes out of the barrel of a Russian gun. The good Germans define themselves publicly by wishing this weren’t true because they realise there’s nothing they can do to stop the rest of their countrymen from throwing themselves at Russian guns until there are no more of them, the good Germans among them.

One of these wishfully good Germans is called Florian Roetzer, who founded the widely read internet publication Telepolis in 1996,   and retired to write elsewhere in 2021.  Roetzer has just published his analysis of the transcript of last month’s teleconference at which the chief of the German Air Force, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz, discussed with three subordinates a plan of attack on Russian civil and military targets with the German Taurus KEPD 350E cruise missile;    conceal this German operation behind British, French, and Ukrainian forces and German commercial companies; accelerate the missile deliveries; and present the plan for approval by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Gerhartz  is not only waging personal war against Russia, as he explained on the telephone two weeks ago, on February 19. Last November he declared personal war in alliance with the Israel Air Force in implementing the genocide of Gaza.  

The Gerhartz transcript, translated from German, can be read here.  

In Roetzer’s new analysis, published on March 2 in Overton magazine,   the problem is not (in Roetzer’s mind) that Gerhartz and the Bundeswehr are losing their war on the Ukrainian battlefield, or that they are aiming to provoke Russian counterattack against German targets outside that battlefield.

“The fact that Russia was able to eavesdrop on the conversations of the German officers…is a major problem for the Bundeswehr, also in relation to its partners, who may no longer trust it.”

“The bigger [sic] problem, however, has been Putin’s for quite some time, after one red line after another has been crossed by the NATO countries, without Russia really reacting to it, apart from warnings…But so far, Putin has accepted any military support for Ukraine. But if it is now becoming more and more public knowledge that NATO countries are directly supporting Ukraine with target data and in general in attacks with Western missiles and cruise missiles through the participation of soldiers in civilian and intelligence officers, and thus become parties to war, then Putin, who propagates that Russia is defending itself in Ukraine, has the problem of showing weakness and only bluffing, if no action is taken against it.”

“It is obvious” – according to Roetzer – “that Russia cannot compete against a NATO weakened by the Ukraine war and therefore avoids a direct conflict. But if the attacks on Russia continue to increase and Western weapons are openly used, Putin will lose support in Russia if there is no military response…With the publication of the wiretapped conversation of the German officers, the Russian leadership may have harmed itself – if only because the Bundeswehr must now try to close the security gap. It is possible that [state media director Margarita] Simonyan has gone too far here. The question is whether the publication was coordinated with the Kremlin.”

That Germany is at war with Russia has been understood in Moscow for a long time. That there are good Germans like Roetzer who would like it to be otherwise for moral, legal, German national, or personal reasons is also well-known. Some of these good Germans have even served as German generals.  

What the Navalny Novichok episode of the autumn of 2020 revealed, followed by the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022; and now last month’s  teleconference conducted by Gerhartz – what all three episodes reveal is not how the Germans are  understood in Moscow, but rather how the good Germans react when confronted with the war they are powerless to deter or stop their countrymen from waging.

The impotence of the German opposition to this war is also well understood in Moscow. What remains is for the Kremlin and General Staff to decide to teach the Germans the only lesson by the only method they understand. That is the lesson the Germans have been failing to learn for seventy-nine years next month — since April 30, 1945, when Adolf Hitler shot himself before he could be captured by the Red Army waiting outside his bunker in Berlin.

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The collapse of the Ukrainian army following the battle of Avdeyevka, and its disorganized retreat, have accelerated Russian military thinking of how far westward the NATO allies will decide that the Ukrainian statelet can be defended against the expected Russian advance – and how fast new NATO defences can be created without the protection of ground-to-air missile batteries like Patriot, long-range artillery like the M777, and mobile armour like the Abrams, Bradley, and Caesar: all of them  have already been defeated in the east.

In short, there is no longer a NATO-command line of fortification east of the Polish border which deters the Russian General Staff. Also, no bunker for the Zelensky government and its NATO advisors to feel secure.

Cutting and pasting from the Russian military bloggers and the Moscow analytical media, as a handful of US podcasters and substackers are doing as often as their subscribers require, is the Comfy-Armchair method for getting at the truth.   Reading the Russian sources directly, with the understanding that they are reporting what their military and intelligence sources are saying off the record, is still armchair generalship, but less comfy,  more credible.

Offence is now the order of the day up and down the contact line. The daily bulletin from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow calls this “improving the tactical situation” and “taking more advantageous positions”. In the past three days, Monday through Wednesday, the Defense Ministry also reported the daily casualty rate of the Ukrainian forces at 1,175, 1,065, and 695, respectively; three M777 howitzer hits; and the first Abrams tank to be destroyed.  Because this source is blocked in several of the NATO states, the Russian military bloggers, which reproduce the bulletins along with videoclips and maps, may be more accessible; also more swiftly than the US-based podcasters and substackers can keep up.

Moscow sources confirm the obvious:  the operational objective is to apply more and more pressure at more and more points along the line, in as many sectors or salients (“directions” is the Russian term) as possible simultaneously.  At the same time, air attack, plus missiles and drones, are striking all rear Ukrainian and NATO airfield, road, and rail nodes, ammunition storages, vehicle parks, drone manufactories, fuel dumps, and other supply infrastructure, so as make reinforcement and redeployment more difficult and perilous.

What cannot be seen are the Russian concentrations of forces aimed in the north, centre and south of the battlefield. Instead, there is what one source calls “an educated guess is that when the main blow comes, it will be North,  Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov, Poltava,  or Centre,  Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye,  or both simultaneously.” For timing, the source adds, “after the Russian election.”

That is now less than three weeks away, on March 17. President Vladimir Putin will then reform his new government within four to six weeks for announcement by early May. Ministerial appointments sensitive to the General Staff’s planning are the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is expected to remain in place; and the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who may retire.

Following the call of French President Emmanuel Macron for the “possibility” of French ground force deployment to the Ukraine battlefield, and the subsequent clarification by French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the Russian assessment has been derisory. “As for Emmanuel Macron’s statements about the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine,” replied Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova,  “I would like to remind you that just a month ago, the French Foreign Minister denied Paris’s involvement in recruiting mercenaries for the Kiev regime, and called direct evidence ‘crude Russian propaganda.’  There is a strong impression that the French President is, in principle, not aware of what his subordinates say, or what he says himself.  And now I want to remind Macron of the history of France. That is different. In April 1945, Berlin was defended by the French SS division known as Charlemagne, and a number of others. They also directly defended the Fuhrerbunker — Hitler’s bunker. They were among the last to be awarded the Nazi Order of the Knight’s Cross in the Third Reich. The French SS men from Charlemagne became the last defenders of the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Emmanuel, have you decided to organize the Charlemagne II division to defend Zelensky’s bunker?”

The view in Moscow is that there is now as much indecision, vacillation,  and chaos between  the Elysée and the Hexagon Balard  in Paris as there is in Washington between the White House and the Pentagon, over what last stand NATO can make in the Ukraine, and where to position it —  east of Kiev, or east of Lvov and the Polish border region.

The Moscow source again: “the NATO fortress and bunker plan for the Ukraine is proving a failure, and the Ukrainians are falling back on the old Wehrmacht tactic of ad hoc battlegroups with  increasing percentages of unit leftovers and low-quality conscripts acting as fire brigades to plug holes in the lines so as to delay the Russian advances. But what is the bunker fallback plan along what lines – is the plan to wait until the Americans, French, Germans or Poles show up? This is the stuff of Nazi dreams. It’s too late.”

A western military source comments: “I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability);  and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”

“The Russian ‘retreat’ conducted in Fall of 2022 was part of the plan and struck me as being inspired by the Mongol tactic of attacking, making a big show of running away, only to turn to pursue and then destroy the enemy. The Ukrainians and their NATO handlers fell for it hook, line and sinker. Now they don’t have the forces needed to maintain their fortress strategy, let alone conduct much in the way of counter-attacks. It was in this fashion that Gerasimov gained the upper hand in the two-front war – the one on the Ukrainian battlefield and the one on the Russian home front.”

“Deep battle is still the Russian doctrine. Its form and components may change, but the concept remains the same. The art is in figuring out where and when the holes drilled in the other side’s military, economic, and political structures will line up, and present the path to be exploited by Gerasimov. We can bet he’s known for quite some time.”

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Alexei Navalny’s organization outside Russia is now repudiating Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny’s mother, for having accepted the medical evidence and official certification that the cause of his death was an embolism, or blood clot, which stopped his heart.

On Monday, several days after the release of the post-mortem documents and of Navalny’s body to his mother’s custody,  Maria Pevchikh, Navalny’s script writer, and Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, have repeated their allegations that Navalny had been murdered. In their revised version of the story on Monday, Pevchikh claimed in a self-produced video that “on February 16, 2024, Vladimir Putin killed Alexei Navalny”.  

Reuters, the New York-based news agency, reported Pevchikh’s claim, adding that “Maria Pevchikh, who is based outside Russia, did not present documentary evidence for her assertion.”   The New York Times amplified Pevchikh’s allegations, but omitted the Reuters qualifier.  The newspaper did not report attempting to make contact with Lyudmila Navalnaya but added this innuendo: “it remained unclear whether his family would seek to conduct an independent autopsy before his burial.”

“Alexei Navalny could be sitting in this seat right now, right today,” Pevchikh broadcast.   “That’s not a figure of speech, it could and should have happened…Navalny was supposed to be free in the coming days.” Pevchikh then recited details of a purported exchange of Russian spies in prison outside Russia in exchange for Navalny and Americans in Russian prisons.

The NATO-funded Bellingcat organization was involved, Pevchikh said. “Investigator Hristo Grozev helped us devise and implement this plan.” Negotiations took place with American and German officials, she said, but “they did nothing.” She then said:  “Roman Abramovich was the one who delivered the proposal to swap Navalny to Putin. As an informal negotiator communicating with American and European officials, and at the same time representing Putin; an unofficial channel of communication with the Kremlin.” Pevchikh claims she asked Abramovich for details of what had been told to Putin and what the president replied. “Unfortunately”, Pevchikh said, “Abramovich did not answer these questions but he did not deny anything either.”

Yarmysh followed Pevchikh with a 3-line tweet: “We know why Alexei was killed right now. He should have been exchanged literally these days. An offer was made to Putin.”  

The evidence of prisoner swaps between the US, Germany,  and Russia is no news and   corroborated officially, although the identities of the swap candidates keep changing, as do the names of the reported go-betweens. Abramovich’s role as the intermediary in the abortive Istanbul negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials of March 2022  has not been followed with any report of subsequent intermediation by Abramovich, except to save himself from sanctions.  

All that is missing from the new Pevchikh-Yarmysh announcements is the medical evidence of the cause of Navalny’s death. That is being closely held by Navalny’s mother, and she is in charge of the arrangements for his funeral.  

In her latest tweet, Yarmysh implies this too is no longer under the outside organization’s control, as it proposes an alternative, parallel ceremony. “We are looking for a hall for a public farewell to Alexei,” Yarmysh said yesterday. “Time: end of this work week. If you have suitable premises, please contact us.”  

Pevchikh is based in London; Yarmysh left Russia in 2021 and is also abroad. They are the Whites now. The Reds, Navalny’s mother and Anatoly Navalny, his father, remain in Moscow. The Reds are holding the evidence that Navalny was not murdered and that everything  the Whites are saying is false.

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Two women, Kira Yarmysh (lead image, left) and Maria Pevchikh (2nd left), made up the series of lies which in August 2020 claimed that Alexei Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok by a Russian state death squad – first in a cup of tea he drank at Tomsk Airport; then in a bottle of mineral water which he drank in his hotel room; and finally in the underpants he dressed himself with before the water, before the tea.

As each of these claims proved untrue on the public evidence,  they and Navalny agreed to the release of medical data collected by the group of German doctors who treated Navalny after his admission to the Charité Clinic in Berlin on August 22, 2020. But neither data presented in the doctors’ publication in The Lancet of December 22, 2020, nor the doctors’ report itself proved that Navalny had been poisoned by Novichok. That conclusion came in press releases from the German military, and then from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

According to the Berlin doctors, “severe poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor was subsequently diagnosed. 2 weeks later, the German Government announced that a laboratory of the German armed forces designated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had identified an organophosphorus nerve agent from the Novichok group in blood samples collected immediately after the patient’s admission to Charité, a finding that was subsequently confirmed by the OPCW.”  

That’s a political advertisement, not a medical diagnosis – no doctor has signed his name to either, and no German military officer has signed his name to the first.

One day before The Lancet publication, on December 21, Navalny, Pevchikh and Yarmysh published their fabrication of the underpants story with the fake telephone call of an FSB agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, admitting to Navalny everything which had been disproved until that time.  The combination of fabricated evidence of the murder weapon and then of the murderer’s accomplice was repeated in the documentary film which won the Oscar award for documentary films in March 2023.  

Yarmysh was Navalny’s press spokesman in August 2020; she still is. Pevchikh was the script writer for Navalny and the channel to him from Anglo-American government agents,  as well from Russian financiers in London like Yevgeny Chichvarkin, once the Evroset mobile telephone magnate.  

If the two women had been telling the truth and Novichok had been in Navalny’s tea, water, or underpants, he would have been dead within minutes of contact. So too would Pevchikh who hand-carried the water bottle from Tomsk to Novosibirsk, then Omsk, and finally Berlin. Navalny’s blood, urine, skin, and hair, clinically tested and reported by the German doctors treating him at Charité Clinic, proved his collapse had been caused by a combination of drugs he had himself consumed.  

The two women, and other members of Navalny’s family, including his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, (3rd left) 47, his mother Lyudmila Navalnaya (right), 69, and his daughter Daria, 23,  have all refused to disclose any medical data on his prior medical conditions and the medicines he was taking before the August 2020 episode. Navalny himself gave permission to the Charité Clinic doctors in Berlin to publish their test results in The Lancet report, believing they would corroborate his story.

Following Navalny’s death on February 16, 2024, there has been no release of the medical data, nor the medicines Navalny was taking at the time of his death; the record of his vaccinations against Covid-19 which were given to him in Germany; his prior medical conditions; or the toxicology and pathology data collected in the post-mortem investigations following his death.

Russian law prohibits the release of this personal information without the permission of the senior next of kin and executor whom Navalny named in his will. He named his mother, Lyudmila. He did not name his wife, Yulia. His reason for doing that has begun to surface in Moscow. It marks infighting over the political succession to Navalny, and the money which the US has been providing to the Navalny organization.

That heirs fight over succession rights, assets and cash is commonplace. What has not yet been noticed in either the Russian or western press reporting is the document on which probate cases start the world over – the will of the deceased.

The first sign that an inheritance fight has begun is that while Lyudmila Navalnaya went to Kharp, where Navalny had been imprisoned, and Salekhard, where his body was taken for post-mortem testing, Yulia Navalnaya flew to California to meet President Joseph Biden.  Between the two political corpses, a lot of money is at stake.

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When the previous piece on the Russian art market was published early this week, an Anglo-European art critic didn’t like the independent direction this market is now forced to take. He was also angry that his personal animus towards President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army,  and the war against the US and NATO in the Ukraine was quoted. “You sound like a Putin stooge”, he added.

The source is an Englishman working in Geneva named Simon Hewitt. He is emphatic in belittling the quality of Russian painters compared to their French counterparts, and also the Russian galleries, entrepreneurs, and promoters now trying to build the Russian art market – compelled for the first time in their history to be independent of foreign aesthetics and the business of the art trade; that’s  Anglo-French aesthetics, Franco-American business,*  and the Russian oligarchs dependent on them.   

Hewitt, who has been employed to follow the Russian art auctions of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and MacDougall’s, has now become a Russia hater. “I don’t expect to be back in Russia,” he has said, “until the war is over. I imagine that the Russian army will eventually vote with its feet as it did in 1917, but my guess is that won’t be for another 18 months or so.” Hewitt’s once measured assessments of Russian painting since 2014  have been transformed into a political and military ideology, the object of which is the defeat of Russia in the war, and its collapse into another revolution.

The capitulation of Russian culture to its US and European masters is what this ideology requires – and the recapture of the Russian art market by the triad,  the name which Russian art experts give to Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and MacDougall’s.*

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

To the French artist Claude Monet goes the credit for inventing the idea of making money by producing series of paintings on the same subject – haystacks, poplar trees, church fronts, and water lilies – adding a premium for buying the series as a single lot; dubbing them with a theory of light refraction and of evanescence in the eye of the beholder; then advertising heavily in the newspapers.

Monet’s first Haystack sold for 2,500 francs ($500) in Paris in April 1891; at the time he advertised falsely that he had received double the price. In May 2019, one of his 25-piece Haystack series fetched $110.7 million in New York.*  

One isn’t obliged to appreciate Monet’s haystacks in order to appreciate the investment return which the art market is capable of producing, given the right ratio of short supply to heavy demand, plus a sustained effort at market rigging.

This is now the ambition, the calculation, and the hope of the leading fine art dealers of Moscow and St Petersburg as they devise their plan for marketing Russian painting after the sanctions war has removed Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and MacDougall’s from market competition and price fixing for Russian art and Russian art buyers.

“The word ‘Russia’ is currently unusable in the West,” says Simon Hewitt, an art market analyst in Geneva. “Russians cannot buy or sell in the West at present, period. That will remain the case for as long as Putin remains in power. I suppose a half-decent Aivazovsky will sell OK in Moscow but the more run-of-the-mill 19th century stuff will struggle to get 30% of what it was worth before Covid and will only appeal to optimists who hope that this figure might rise to 60% or so in the next decade.”

Hewitt’s lack of optimism isn’t shared by his counterparts in Moscow. They believe that in removing the “triad”, the three London auction houses from the Russian art market, the opportunity is now growing fast for Russian auction houses to achieve the house profits and rates of return for Russian art buyers which were impossible before the war.

“In the middle of 2023 the activity began picking up in the domestic market,” reports Denis Lukashin, a leading Moscow art expert and co-owner of Art Consulting, which advises Russian buyers on authentication of works and market pricing trends for individual artists. “Because Russian art was blocked in the foreign auction houses, lots of buyers came back to the Russian market. And they buy rather expensive items. Auction houses are presenting new items for public sale, which, before, were usually sold in a closed or private format.  So in the historic and fine art sector the prices are returning to the norm before February 2022. In the other genres, the owners, collectors and sellers won’t lose anything in price. I can say the prices have been rising  despite the new economic situation, and so has the demand for modern art.”

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Since a pack of lies about Alexei Navalny (lead image, right) won last year’s Oscar for the best documentary film of the year when he was alive,   there’s no doubt he can win another Oscar when he’s dead.  But alive or dead, the prize-winning propaganda of Navalny’s story bears no resemblance to the truth. This is what happens in wartime, especially when the side which is losing the war on the battlefield – that’s the US, NATO and the Ukraine – claims to be winning the war of words against Russia.

The Navalny story is now in two parts: Part 1, the Novichok in his airport cup of tea, in his hotel water bottle, and then in his underpants which causes Navalny’s collapse, but fails to be detected by Russian doctors in Omsk, by German doctors in Berlin and Munich, and then  by Swedish and French state laboratories. Part 2, Navalny’s sudden death after he had taken a  walk  in the IK-3 penal colony in the village of Kharp, in the Russian Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets.  The first part took 62 reports in this archive to expose the faking;   the most telling evidence of this came from Navalny himself in the documented tests of his blood, urine and hair. According to these data, Navalny’s collapse was the outcome of an overdose of lithium, benzodiazepines, and other drugs.  

Part 2 of the Navalny story began last Friday, February 16, with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) announcement, followed by an official telegramme to his mother in Moscow,  that he had died  just after two in the afternoon, Yamalo-Nenets time; that was just after noon Moscow time. Two hours later the Russian media began carrying the official announcement.  The wording of the last line of the announcement is significant. “The causes of death are being established”, the FSIN statement said.  Causes — plural.

In the UK coroner’s court practice, what this means is that there is likely to have been a sequence of causation, medically speaking, with the first or proximate cause of death identified as heart, brain, or lung injury or failure; and the second, intervening or contributory cause of death such as biochemical factors, including prescription drugs in lethal combination; mRNA anti-Covid vaccination triggering fatal blood clots; or homicidal poisons.   For example, in the case of the alleged Russian Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in England in 2018, the evidence is of British government tampering with the post-mortem reports to add Novichok when it wasn’t identified at first.  

In Navalny’s case, poisoning on the order of President Vladimir Putin has already been announced  as the cause of Navalny’s death without evidence at all. The delay time required for the complicated processes of forensic pathology and toxicology to establish the evidence has been reported in the Anglo-American media to signify cover-up and body snatching.   Meduza, an oppositionist publication in Riga, reports that “a doctor who advised Navalny’s associates” has said that blood clotting was “an unlikely cause of death” – this is medically false.   

In speculation of poisoning as cause of death, there is at least as much likelihood that Navalny, his team,  and their CIA and MI6 handlers devised a repeat of the August 2020 Tomsk operation; decided when Navalny met with his lawyer at the prison on February 14; but implemented two days later without the resuscitation Navalny himself was expecting.

The Anglo-American propaganda warfare army is already pronouncing the contributory Cause 2– Putin did it — as the cause of Navalny’s death. If the Russians announce the proximate Cause 1 as cardiac arrest or brain aneurism, without a Cause 2, they won’t be believed. In the short term, Cause 2 cannot be established with credibility in Russia since it took the British government ten years, 2006-2016, to fabricate their story of Russian polonium  poisoning in the Alexander Litvinenko case. In the Russian Novichok cases in England, it has so far taken six years of court, police and pathologist proceedings, 2018-2024, without outcome, and another two years will follow.

The problem for readers to interpret what has happened is that the Anglo-American propaganda warfare machine is better at what it does than the Russian side. But then when it comes to war with guns, not words, the Russian side is far superior, as can be seen in the Ukraine right now. Accordingly, the Kremlin has decided to concentrate on the main fight. Inside Russia, it has been obvious for a long time that in or out of prison, Navalny alive was politically insignificant; now even less. The new western propaganda is as ineffectual for Russians as Navalny was himself.

And so the purpose of the propaganda is different. President Joseph Biden’s statement on Navalny’s death makes this clear. “This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment.  We have to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself against Putin’s vicious onslaughts and war crimes. You know, there was a bipartisan Senate vote that passed overwhelmingly in the United States Senate to fund Ukraine. Now, as I’ve said before, and I mean this in the literal sense: History is watching.  History is watching the House of Representatives.  The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.  It’s going to go down in the pages of history.  It really is.  It’s consequential.”    

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

A book by a man announcing himself on page one as an undercover MI6 agent, dedicated on page two to “the people of Ukraine as they continue their fight for freedom”, then endorsed on the dust jacket by the Times newspaper as “first class”, can’t be fiction; it can’t be fact;  and because it declares its audience  restricted to those who already believe and don’t need persuading, it can’t be propaganda.  It’s the fourth gender in the cyber universe — transfiction, transfact, and transpropaganda, a genre created by a combination of covert insertions and circumcisions, reinforced by injections of hallucinatory substances, including money.  

This is what has become of the British these days. The book celebrates it. According to Private Eye, it is “too good to be untrue…Russia and dirty Russian money, out here in the real world, has seeped so deeply into British public life it’s not entirely certain we’ll ever get it out again.”

In this British reality, Charles Beaumont’s book, A Spy Alone,  claims to have uncovered the Kremlin plot to cause the British vote for Brexit and thereby destroy the country’s economy;  allow Russian manipulation of British energy supplies and prices;  destroy the careers of the country’s security chiefs, the  Cabinet Secretary, the National Security Advisor, and the Secret Intelligence Service; ignore and  discredit the intelligence uncovered by MI6 field agents and Bellingcat; and allow Russian assassins to roam across the UK,  killing as they go.

All of this, according to author and hero, amounts to “one of [the Russian government’s] deepest secrets”, “the intelligence coup of the century”, “one of the great revelations in intelligence history”, and “the most important intelligence discovery in Britain since the end of the Cold War”.  In short, this does for Britain what the former MIG agent, Christopher Steele (lead image centre) and his Orbis Business Intelligence Limited, claimed to do, and still does, to US presidential elections and Donald Trump in the fabrications of the Russiagate affair.  

In fact, this new book may be Steele’s attempt to repeat Russiagate in England,  reverse the rulings of the courts against his veracity, and make more money. For Charles Beaumont (lead image, right)  is not the author’s real name; the publisher has published an Artificial Intelligence illustration instead of a real face, and since the book purports to be “Beaumont’s” “first novel”, there is no trace of him in the open sources, not even for Bellingcat to find.  “The blurb says [Beaumont] is ex-MI6, but then it would, or he would,” comments a source in a position to know. “If I were choosing a pseudonym I don’t think I’d pick one that already belonged to an – admittedly very different – writer.” The source believes “Beaumont” is working in the business intelligence business.

Private Eye has told its readers to buy “Beaumont” because he “shows how powerful a book can be when the writer looks the country straight in the face and writes about what they see. Le Carré used to be very good at doing that. Now Charles Beaumont has done it too.”  

Amazon, the world’s largest publisher and bookseller, lacks confidence this is either Russiagate or Le Carré quality. Despite 1,568 ratings as “terrific”, “brilliant”, “stunningly accomplished”, and “scarily plausible”, Amazon is marking the book down to clear at a 50% discount. That’s a steal, not a pun on the real plot in this story.

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The history of Russian sex after the fall of Communist Party rule in 1991 hasn’t been told yet. And it won’t be.

This is because sex between Russians during the Soviet period was a public taboo – its history has been written down as a party and police problem, and buried as a relic of the past.    Then in the period of shock therapy which followed during the US-backed Yeltsin administration, Russian sex became a commercial commodity, like everything else.  Russian women became prostitutes selling sex, and Russian men who lacked the cash to pay for their time missed out. This is known as one of the liberal reforms.

When the heart is excluded from sex, there’s nothing of value to record for posterity, at least nothing of Russian particularity.

It was also during this period that on account of the money value of access to their sexual parts, Russian women began to say, quite clearly, that for their lovers (or clients) they preferred American Jews because, they said, Russian men were reluctant to pay and violent when asked,  whereas American Jews were neither — or so the women said. But the women were just   catching up. Russian men, starting from Mikhail Gorbachev and descending downwards, had long displayed their desire to be loved by Americans, and to be paid in return, handsomely. Wanting to be loved by Americans (and Israelis) is a continuing reflex of Russian men; the posture of bending over to receive the love can’t be reported in the history books by the term  handsome, unless it’s accompanied by gender reversal. About that, Russians of both sexes are emphatically hostile.  

The Russian women’s idea of Jews as non-violent, or at least less violent than Russian men, has been turned  on its head — wrong organ — by Russian politicians who have celebrated their Israeli counterparts for their lack of inhibition in using violence, not only against the Arabs, but against their women.

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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Twice already the warning of the obvious has been posted in the money markets — Israel cannot survive a long war with the Arabs and Iran.

In this long war, the gods do not favour the Chosen People, it was reported on October 27, three weeks after the Hamas offensive began.   The decline in Israel’s export earnings from tourism and diamonds; the loss of imported supplies for manufacturing and consumption from the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea; and increasing risk to both imports and exports at the Mediterranean ports within range of Hamas and Hezbollah strikes were identified at that time.

The international ratings agencies, Moody’s, Fitch and Standard and Poors, postponed announcing the obvious for as long as they could.

In attrition war, on the economic front just like the Gaza and other fire fronts, the Axis of Resistance wins by maintaining its offensive capacities and operations for longer than the US and US-backed Israeli forces can defend. Like troops, tanks, and artillery pieces, the operational goal is to grind the enemy slowly but surely into retreat, then capitulation. Last week, Moody’s had already decided in-house to downgrade Israel; for several days senior management fended off a ferocious attack from Israeli officials and their supporters in the US trying to compel postponement of the downgrade and the analytical report  substantiating it.

On February 6, in a review of the shekel, bond, credit default swaps (CDS), budget deficit, and other indicators, the conclusion was there could be no stopping the money markets from moving against Israel.  Negative ratings from the agencies raise the cost of servicing Israel’s state and corporate bonds, and put pressure on the state budget. A ratings downgrade is a signal to the markets to go negative against the issuer – this usually comes after the smart money has changed its mind and direction.  In Israel’s case, however, there has been an exceptional delay between negative outlook and downgrade.  The last Fitch report on Israel was dated October 17; Moody’s followed on October 19; Standard & Poors (S&P) on October 24.  

That Israeli and US tactics had forced postponement of new reports from the troika was obvious. A fresh warning was published on this website: as real estate and other tax collections collapse, Israel will have to make a large cash call on the US.  This is going to come in the near future, just as the government in Kiev has been forced into calling on Congress as the Ukraine war is being lost. The longer both wars are protracted, the more obviously the loss of confidence expresses itself in Washington.  

Moody’s has now caught up.  According to the Israeli press, this is the first credit and currency downgrade in their country’s history.  

In a report dated last Friday but not issued until Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, the agency officially reduced Israel’s rating from A1 to A2, and added pointers of further downgrading to come. The Anglo-American press immediately reacted against Moody’s. “Israel hits back”, the Financial Times headlined.  The newspaper added: “[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, in a rare statement over the Jewish Sabbath, said: ‘The rating downgrade is not connected to the economy, it is entirely due to the fact that we are in a war. The rating will go back up the moment we win the war — and we will win the war.’” In the Associated Press report, “Israel’s finance minister blasts Moody’s downgrade”.   Rupert Murdoch’s platform Fox claimed: “Israel has a strong, open economy despite Moody’s downgrade”.  “Israel’s creditworthiness remains high,” according to the New York Times, “but the rating agency noted that the outlook for the country was negative… A rating of A2 is still a high rating.”  

The press release version of Moody’s report is republished verbatim so that its meaning can be understood without the propaganda.

Three points have been missed in the Anglo-American counterattack and Israeli government’s bluster. The first is the warning that Israel will soon have to request enormous cash backing from the US, and if there is any sign of weakening on that in Washington, the collapse of the Israeli economy and its capacity to continue its war is inevitable. The Moody’s report camouflaged the point this way: “The related issuances benefit from an irrevocable, on-demand guarantee provided by the Government of the United States of America (Aaa negative) with the government acting through USAID. The notes benefit explicitly from ‘the full faith and credit of the US’ and as per prospectus, USAID is obligated to pay within three business days if the guarantee is called upon.”

The second point strikes at announcements from Israel Defence Forces (IDF) generals and Netanyahu of their plan to expand their operations on the northern front – the Litani River ultimatum they called it in December. According to Moody’s report, “downside risks remain at the A2 rating level. In particular, the risk of an escalation involving Hezbollah in the North of Israel remains, which would have a potentially much more negative impact on the economy than currently assumed under Moody’s baseline scenario. Government finances would also be under more intense pressure in such a scenario.”

The third point is the most explosive. After cutting Israel’s rating to A2, Moody’s warned that further and deeper downgrades may follow, but that there is presently no way the ratings agency can predict what will happen next. “The ongoing military conflict with Hamas, its aftermath and wider consequences materially raise political risk for Israel as well as weaken its executive and legislative institutions and its fiscal strength, for the foreseeable future.”

In flagging those last four words – “for the foreseeable future” — Moody’s has told the markets  that the strategic initiative in this war has now passed to the Axis of Resistance. Of course, the Arabs and Iranians already know.

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