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.”

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, January 19th, 2025
No Comments »

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.  

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025
No Comments »

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.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, January 14th, 2025
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In a single line expressed through a reporter, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has explained the defeat of Syria as a tactical withdrawal in preparation for the “military conflict with NATO, and in the next 10 years. So, Russia right now needs solutions that will ensure at least a long-term balance in the global confrontation.”  

This line appeared in the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad on January 3; there was no mention of Syria.  In case the significance was missed, Vzglyad added the editorial line in italics: “In a long confrontation with the West, it is important to skillfully combine the economy and military. Judging by the first results of the activities of the economist Belousov as Minister of Defense, this is exactly what we see.”

A political source in Moscow concurs. “Russia has to fight all of NATO head-on within the next ten years. So if a deal can be made now to earn some time to rearm, then that’s a strategic choice that is going to have to be made.”

Not all military sources in Moscow agree. Some believe that during the process in October and November when President Vladimir Putin listened to General Staff and Foreign Ministry arguments for opposing the Turkish plan to break out of Idlib and capture Damascus, the Kremlin underestimated the message that Russia’s acquiescence would deliver to the US and the NATO allies. “Anyone now thinking Russia can be counted on as ally”, comments one, “is mistaken.”

These sources believe that now the pressure on Putin to make fresh concessions in the Ukraine will intensify. “The US and NATO used the time we conceded in Minsk  to prepare the war we weren’t as prepared to fight as they were in February 2022. Delay was our mistake. They want time now to rearm the Kiev regime for the next round. We should be aiming for capitulation in Kiev and no future for the enemy. For us, that’s the strategy.”.”

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, January 12th, 2025
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Imagine the history of a bank written by the driver of the getaway car used by a gang of holdup men after their heist.

Then imagine the driver and his gang are religious fundamentalists convinced that what they are doing is God’s mission to reform the banking business by introducing daylight robbery as one of what they call the “underpinnings of capitalism”.

As the car speeds away with the loot, the driver leads the other gangsters in reciting their mantras: “obviously it was the Wild West”; “there’s a ton of money to be made in chaos”;  “capitalism in Russia wasn’t born under laboratory conditions. It was born in a vacuum of governance”; “with Goldman Sachs’ analysis backing you , investing in Russia became the closest thing you could get to a no-brainer”.

These lines have been written by a man called Charles Hecker (lead image, right), a reporter for the Moscow Times in the 1990s who turned into a Russia expert for the Control Risks group of London. After that employment ended recently, he has published a book with the title, Zero Sum, The Arc of International Business in Russia.

What’s unusual about this is that in 457 pages, Hecker doesn’t present or analyse the annual reports, financial balance-sheets, Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectuses, or market regulation filings of a single significant Russian company or business sector. Instead, Hecker reports interviewing 57 individuals who spent time in Russia between 1991 and 2022, working for  mostly US and British companies, law firms, accountancies, hotels, and media. Just seven of these sources (12%) were Russian born, but none has lived in Russia for many years. In Hecker’s footnotes, 647 of them in total, there are just seven Russian-language sources; they are texts of official enactments.  

The outcome is a heist-and-getaway history in which Hecker reports the impact of economic sanctions against Russia on the say-so of think tanks in Kiev, the State Department, and Yale University; the rise of post-Soviet media on the say-so by Dutchman Derk Sauer whose publications in Russia were financed by secret US agencies, then Mikhail Khodorkovsky; the role of Russian crime and criminals on the say-so of Mark Galeotti, a writer in the Rupert Murdoch stable whose book of 2018 was a fabrication with no Russian criminal for its source; the history of state asset privatization on the say-so of Harvard University consultants; the Russian oil business on the say-so of BP executives dictating to the London press; and the fraud and embezzlement prosecution of Baring Vostok and Michael Calvey on the say-so of the Financial Times.

Say-so doesn’t make so. But this is not as hackneyed and pointless as it may sound. The point is easier to acknowledge now during the semifinal stage of the Battle of the Ukraine than during the war preliminaries: the point is that Hecker is employed in a form of counter-intelligence and information warfare to sustain Anglo-American enthusiasm and cashflow for the war despite the defeat of the Anglo-American side on the battlefield.

What Hecker doesn’t understand (cannot see in the book’s evidence) is that the extraordinary reward-to-risk multiples, ratios of debt to earnings and profit to outlay, speed of payback, and zero rate of taxation which characterized Russian business between 1991 and 2022, were planned   weapons of the Anglo-American war to destroy Russia, its economy first, then its military capacity to defend itself, and finally its social cohesion. That war has been hot by degrees since 1917, never cold.  Following the corrupt betrayals by Russian leaders themselves between 1991 and 2000, this war almost ended in Russia’s capitulation.

It still may.  

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, January 12th, 2025
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Diogenes of Sinope (lead image, centre), the still famous philosopher of ancient Greece, had an unusually long and exceptionally miserable life between 412 and 323 BC. 

There’s no telling whether he inherited the profits of his father’s money manipulation business, but by the time he was captured by pirates,  enslaved,  and then put up for sale,  he had nothing with which to pay the ransom. He was not the first crooked banker’s son to end up in poverty. He was the first, and possibly the last crooked banker’s son to make a virtue of poverty, and to demonstrate this in his lifestyle – living in a barrel, sleeping rough, going naked in the street, and declaiming rude jokes about the rulers and institutions of Athens, the state in which he lived.   

There is some dispute over whether Diogenes’s barrel was in fact a large wine or oil storage jar; and whether the cause of his death was suicide by self-suffocation, gastroenteritis from raw  octopus, or manslaughter by a hungry dog. 

There is no dispute over the fame Diogenes continues to enjoy for his subversion of the powerful, wealthy, and gullible of his society, and for the wit of his apothegms. They are all hearsay; next to nothing Diogenes wrote has survived.In the truth and in truth-telling,  it’s certain that Diogenes was a believer. But excepting himself, towards truth-tellers in particular – journalists, lawyers, University of Chicago professors, and veterans of the US Marine Corps and CIA – Diogenes was more than cynical. He illustrated this point with his habit of walking about in the bright sunshine with a lighted lantern. Asked what he was doing, he quipped that he was looking for an honest man.

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, December 20th, 2024
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Quoting Mark Twain, President Vladimir Putin has made his first public statement on Syria during his Direct Line broadcast on Thursday. “Whoever wants to imagine Russia weakened…I want to recall the famous man and writer, who once said: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’”  

During four and a half hours of question-and-answer, Putin responded to questions on the Syrian conflict from a US and later a Turkish reporter.  He said the future of the Russian bases at Khmeimim and Tartus is undecided. “The vast majority of [Syrian groups] tell us that they would want our military bases to remain in Syria. I don’t know — we should think about it, because we have to decide for ourselves how we relate to the political forces that are now in control and will control the situation in this country in the future. Our interests ought to coincide. If we stay there, then we have to do something in the interests of the country where we are.

”Putin endorsed the Turkish military movements into Syria over the Israeli ones. “Israel is also solving security issues for itself…We hope that Israel someday will leave the territory of Syria, but right now it is bringing in there additional troops. I think there are already thousands of troops. And I have such an impression, that they are not only not going to leave, but they are going to reinforce there…Turkey needs to ensure its security somehow. We understand that all. This is not for today’s meeting, so as not to waste time.”

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 19th, 2024
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch.

That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded and outread by the alternative media. They call themselves the alt-media, but the alternatives they offer are no more than ideological variants of the same basic market laws which Murdoch has observed and demonstrated.  That’s to say, making money at serving state force, fraud, and subversion. 

Murdoch was even a success at selling outdoor advertising placards on Russian city streets until he was forced out of that market by men whose crookedness wasn’t greater than his, but who exploited their local political advantage in exactly the same fashion as Murdoch does. The outcome was that in 2011 Russia had the only government in the world able and willing to do real damage to Murdoch – and throw him out. That year Dmitry Medvedev was president; Vladimir Putin, prime minister. By them Murdoch was forced to sell his street signs and radio stations for less than a sixth of his asking price.  

Murdoch swore violent revenge for that; he’s been at it against Russia ever since, from The Times to the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to Catherine Belton’s book.  

Thirty years ago, as he was dying, Dennis Potter, the British screenwriter, said “I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.”  Now that Murdoch is almost dead himself, and his family is cracking up over – what else? – the money, the cancer he represents in the mainstream media can also be recognized in the alt-media — and in the corner of the alt-media focusing on Russia and the war in the Ukraine. The Ruperts in this corner have names like Seymour and Gilbert. 

If watching or reading them can be brain sapping, is there any remedy, and if so, what is it?  These and other reader questions are answered in this Direct Line. 

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, December 17th, 2024
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

President Vladimir Putin gave a party rally speech in Moscow on Saturday in which he omitted to mention seven of the eight domestic issues most troubling Russian voters – inflation; high interest-rate caused stagnation in the economy; corruption;  low quality education;  poor public health care; terrorism; and illegal immigrants.  

He made an exception for the Special Military Operation and “the front to fight for the Motherland”.

To Russians who tell pollsters the protracted war and the casualty rate are their biggest concerns, Putin said not to worry — he and his party are taking care of both: “The United Russia party has been supporting our troops literally from the first day of the special military operation: it submits important draft laws to create legal and social guarantees for our heroes and their families; assists the recovery of the liberated regions; collects and delivers everything the civilians there need. The party also does much for the veterans who are back from the combat areas, helps them realise themselves in civilian professions, in public and political life.”  

Reading methodically without departing from his script, Putin told delegates at the 22^nd Congress of United Russia that the party stands for “the unity of people, faith in the country and in our victory…the desire to ensure the safety of the Motherland, to protect our sacred historical memory, spirituality, traditions.”  This is political boilerplate — and it’s bullet-proof. The polls reinforce Putin’s message with the assurance that Russian voters see and fancy no alternative. 

(more…)

by Editor - Saturday, December 14th, 2024
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The illustration of power coming out of the barrel of a gun is from a comic book. Contemplating the reality of Russia’s position in Syria, no one in a position to know believes in cartoon captions,  the credibility of the gun, or the direction in which the horse is now running.

Military sources in Moscow have told a tale of President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to defend the Syrian Arab Army and the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad. That decision, the sources claim, was taken at least two weeks before the Turkish break-out from Idlib began on November 27, and was conveyed to Assad personally by December 6.  

It had been hinted at four days earlier, on December 2, when Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, made an urgent telephone call to Putin. In principle, the Kremlin announced, Putin and Pezeshkian agreed on “unconditional support for the efforts of Syria’s legitimate authorities to restore constitutional order and maintain the country’s territorial integrity.”  

In practice, there was a Russian condition. Putin told Pezeshkian that Russian anti-aircraft units in Syria would not operate against Israeli attack and defend the Iranian air bridge to Khmeimim for the troops and arms which Assad had been requesting urgently,  and which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was ready to send. Putin also told the Iranian President that Russian ground forces and artillery would not engage Turkish forces moving southward, and would not bomb them from the air. 

By the time Putin and Pezeshkian were speaking, after days of the closed-door debate with the General Staff, Putin believed he had the word of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Russia’s principal military bases at Tartus and Khmeimim would not be attacked and Russian forces not threatened.  Their pre-condition was that Putin would not encourage or defend Iranian reinforcements. 

The General Staff and GRU warned Putin that Erdogan and Netanyahu could not be trusted, and that without Russian military force to deter them, plus Iranian troops,  they would take over Syrian territory – the Turks down the coast to the Lebanese border and to Damascus; the Israelis across the Golan and the Quneitra buffer zone into the southern outskirts of Damascus.

The Security Council met openly only once with Putin during this debate – on December 5. The official communiqué does not report that Syria was discussed.    

“Russia does not betray friends in difficult situations,” was the line the Kremlin told the Foreign Ministry to instruct its diplomats to announce after Assad had landed in Moscow on December 8, adding the footnote that “a deal has been done to ensure the safety of Russian military bases.”   The Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova,  did not go so far. “Our number-one priority is ensuring the safety of the Russian citizens currently residing in Syria, and protecting Russia’s property and its diplomatic, military and other missions,” she said.  

Zakharova was signalling there was no deal for the bases short of evacuation from Syria, with terms of safe passage still to be negotiated with the Turks. The camouflage for this is a multinational negotiation the Foreign Ministry is proposing for Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf Arab states, and the United Nations special envoy for Syria.     

Asked what reaction Russia has to the Israeli occupation of southern Syria, Zakharova said: “it is incumbent upon all members of the international community, especially neighbouring nations, to exhibit restraint and an elevated level of responsibility by refraining from actions that could provoke further deterioration of the situation in Syria.” Asked what role Israel and the US had played in the invasion and military coup in Syria, she replied: “The situation is being analyzed. There will be even more facts qualifying what happened in Syria.”  

Zakharova was not asked for the ministry’s assessment of the part Erdogan had played.  Instead, she said: “Our country respects the leaders of friendly countries, maintains dialogue with them and develops relations with them.”  

The Kremlin record of Putin’s direct telephone conversation with Erdogan on December 3 claims Putin told Erdogan he should agree “to stop radical groups’ terrorist aggression against the Syrian state.”  Erdogan, who initiated the call, didn’t agree.  

The General Staff understood Putin to believe that he had the agreement of Turkey, Israel and indirectly of the United States for a de facto partition of Syria into four military control zones, like Germany following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945. The General Staff warned Putin that Russian military capacities in the bases would be too weak to enforce his verbal exchanges with Erdogan and Netanyahu; that a Russian control zone around the bases could not be protected from a forced evacuation; and that if Putin agreed to this, he was risking the destruction of Russian credibility with strategic allies, Iran first of all, then China. 

Ex-President Dmitry Medvedev was then sent to Beijing on December 12 to explain and assure President Xi Jinping.  Xi has not been reassured.  The General Staff messaged Putin, “We told you so”. Now read on.

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 12th, 2024
No Comments »