By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The longest lasting of the false-flag operations conducted against Russia since the Special Military Operation started in February 2022 has been flying the flag of the United Nations (UN).

The chief flag-bearer has been the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese (lead image, left); he has manipulated, plotted, and lied his way through the Ukrainian hostage-taking at Azovstal, during the Battle of Mariupol;  the Ukrainian attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant; and Ukrainian attempts to break the ports blockade with what the UN has been calling its “Black Sea Grain Initiative”.   

Reinforcing Guterres in these schemes of deceit have been his spokesman, American and Frenchman Stéphane Dujarric (Rothschild),   Argentine Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA);  and the negotiator of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, British lawyer Martin Griffiths (lead image, right)  and https://twitter.com/. Griffiths came to his UN job from a Geneva organization funded by the anti-Russian governments of Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, the UK, Australia, Ireland, and Switzerland. It calls itself “The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue”.  

Guterres’s bluff was called a year ago, on April 26, at the long-table incident in Moscow when President Vladimir Putin told Guterres he was wrong on the facts, biased in his public statements, and acting in violation of his UN authority.  

“You can call it whatever name you like and have whatever bias in favour of those who did it, “ Putin told Guterres after getting him to confirm that the earphone to his interpreter was working. “But this was really an anti-constitutional coup. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the West preferred to ignore all this. After we recognised the independence of these states [Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics], they asked us to render them military aid because they were subjected to military actions, an armed aggression. In accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, Chapter VII, we were forced to do this by launching a special military operation…[About the Battle of Mariupol and the Azovstal hostages] Mr Secretary-General, you have been misled…The simplest thing for military personnel or members of the nationalist battalions is to release the civilians. It is a crime to keep civilians, if there are any there, as human shields.”  

Putin did not shake hands to greet Guterres; he placed him further away than any head of state had ever been seated in conversation at the Kremlin before; Guterres squirmed.  To CNN a day later in Kiev, Guterres lied about what had been said at the meeting.   Later, when asked in New York to say what and when he knew of the foreign combatants at Azovstal, and the use of civilian hostage shields in the battle, Guterres refused to answer.   

The Russian Foreign Ministry has been more explicit in its condemnation of Guterres than of any UN secretary-general before him. “Contrary to the requirements in the UN Charter,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman declared last July, “the [Guterres’ staff] Secretariat is not taking an equidistant position, as one would expect from a Secretariat of the most authoritative international organisation that is designed, among other things, to promote the settlement of disputes.”  

“I would like to remind our esteemed colleagues from the UN Secretariat”, according to Maria Zakharova at the ministry, “that their job is not to take sides in situations of dispute, but to help maintain peace and stability. This is what they are paid for and this is their mandate.”

On September 29, the Foreign Ministry announced: “The relevant functions do not give the Managing Director [Guterres] of the UN Secretariat the right to make biased political statements on behalf of the entire [UN] Organization. Nor is such a person authorized to interpret the norms of the Charter and documents of the General Assembly, including the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation between States in Accordance with the UN Charter… Obviously, A[ntonio] Guterres has not only exceeded his authority, but actually taken sides with the collective West, again resorting to a selective approach in the interpretation of the unfolding events.”  

“We consider unacceptable the fact that the UN Secretary-General has become an instrument of propaganda and pressure on Member States at a time when he should be guided by the UN Charter in its entirety.”

The defeat of the Ukrainian and NATO forces on the battlefield has gradually diminished the value to the US and NATO of the role of the UN Security Council and of Secretary-General Guterres. This has left Grossi exposed as playing the role of spokesman for Kiev when war operations caused the biggest radiation release so far into the atmosphere on May 13 as   Ukrainian army stocks of depleted uranium shells were blown up at Khmelnitsky.  

In the war over food stocks – the attempt to stop Russia exporting grain and crop fertilizers, and to use Ukrainian grain exports to recover Black Sea ports and to conceal attacks on Russian targets  – the role of Griffiths as the UN go-between has failed comprehensively, and for the same reason that Guterres and Grossi have failed. Griffiths told the UN on May 23 that the Ukraine is the victim of Russian attacks based on Kiev press releases. “The biggest challenge remains the impediments to reaching all areas in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia currently under the military control of the Russian Federation.”

Griffiths also claimed that “in recent weeks, we have engaged in intensive discussions with the parties to the Black Sea Initiative, to secure agreement on its extension and the improvements needed for it to operate effectively and predictably. This will continue over the coming days.”

In fact, Griffiths and UN officials cannot “engage” with the Russian side because they are no longer trusted. Griffiths’ claim that he and his staff have “continued to deliver a wide range of support with concrete results under the Memorandum of Understanding on the facilitation of Russian food and fertilizer exports” is false.

The Russian response is that Grossi and Griffiths have been following “illegal instructions to his subordinates” from Guterres.  

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by Editor - Monday, June 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a month it will be three hundred and fourteen years precisely since the Swedes lost their king, their generals, their soldiers, and their empire when Tsar Peter the Great and the Russian army defeated them at the Battle of Poltava (lead image) . That battle of July 8, 1709, is the greatest disaster in Swedish military history; it is the bitterest grudge they hold against Russia, still.   

The Swedes were obliged to accept their inferiority and become a minor power in Europe. Their  strategic calculation ever since has been to conserve their resources by keeping to the winning side in Europe, while hoping to revenge themselves on the Kremlin. At Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, they still hope if,  with Swedish money, arms, and men, the regime in Kiev can manage it.

Over the past week the Swedish Air Force has taken its Saab-made JAS39 Gripen  fighter-bombers to the air, alongside other NATO forces and the USS Gerald Ford in what they are calling Operation Arctic Challenge 23. At the same time, the Swedish Defense Minister Pål  Jonsson, has admitted that he is discussing with Kiev supplying the Gripen for attacking Russian forces over the Ukrainian battlefield. “Yesterday [February 14], I had the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Reznikov….We are significantly increasing our support for Ukraine”.  “President Zelensky also asked for it.”

Jonsson didn’t admit that the Swedes are discussing with the US, NATO, and the Czech Republic a form of disguising the battlefield deployment of the Gripen through third countries and through NATO’s Air Defender 23 exercise, which begins on June 12.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The last time the Norwegians whipped themselves into a frenzy of warmaking race hatred, their minister president was Vidkun Quisling (lead image, left).  

An exceptionally intelligent young military officer, he became the Norwegian General Staff’s expert on Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution. He then was posted to the Norwegian Embassy in St Petersburg early in 1918, returning to Oslo when the embassy was suspended  after the revolution. He returned to Kharkov in 1922 where he married a Russian, and then the following year, he married another local woman, an ethnic Ukrainian. He was in Moscow for three years, 1926-28, first engaged in trading timber and buying Russian antiques, then representing the British Embassy which had been closed after the revolution and British troops invaded.

When he launched his political career at home, Quisling had become a fascist and racist, and his book of 1930, Russland og vi (“Russia and Ourselves”)  a manifesto of Norwegian identity in combat against Bolshevism, revolution, and the Russian race. He met Adolf Hitler (right) many times, starting in mid-1939. “An unspeakable enemy is threatening our civilization”, Quisling’s book began. “This enemy is Bolshevism, the master of Russia and the champion of the World Revolution.” At the time, Norway’s military and economic survival, Quisling believed, depended on the British Empire, as he called it. “The Russian question is an issue between Bolshevism and the Teutonic nations, especially Great Britain, the natural upholder of all that is in opposition to and threatened by Bolshevism.” Breaking up the old Russian Empire’s states and the Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine, Quisling wrote, “might prove a useful means for attaining certain ends, but it might also lead to a reaction which would be destructive to those who had planned it. Charles XII and Germany had that experience in the Ukraine, though this does not necessarily prove much as regards the present and the future. For the rest, it must be remembered that the Ukraine is a country of the same size as Germany, with a population of over 30 millions, possessing great natural wealth, and every qualification for becoming an independent State.”

Quisling’s policy and his party, Nasjonal Samling (NS, “National Gathering”),  were political failures until the German Army invaded and occupied Norway in 1940. Quisling and his NS party ministers were installed in power in Oslo alongside a German reichskommissar reporting to Berlin,   in February 1942. They held office until the Germans left early in 1945. Quisling was arrested in May of that year; put on trial for embezzlement, murder,  and treason; convicted in September; and executed in October.

The first time Quisling’s name was used in English to mean treachery, betrayal, and treason was in an editorial of The Times of London in April 1940. “Quislings everywhere” ran the headline.  In New York, Time magazine followed by turning the name into the verb quisle, and the noun quislers.  Quisling has stuck.

“I want to let history reach its own verdict,” Quisling said from prison after his arrest. “Believe me, in ten years’ time I will have become another Saint Olav.”

More than ninety years have elapsed since Quisling wrote this: “The most effective remedy for Bolshevism and Bolshevist-Russian plots and intrigues will be found in a closer cultural, economic and political co-operation between those peoples which are the main supporters of Western civilization, and which can be described as Nordic in the widest sense of the term. Where are these peoples? They are in the Scandinavian countries, in Holland and Flanders, the British Empire, Germany, the United States of America, to a considerable extent in France, and largely intermingled with the people of other countries where the Nordic race, however, does not prevail to the same extent. A Northern Coalition of these nations, beginning with Scandinavia and Great Britain—and with the inclusion of Finland and Holland—which might attract Germany next, and possibly the British Dominions and America later on would render innocuous any Bolshevist combination, and would within a measurable distance of time ensure European peace and civilization.”

A firing squad put Quisling into the grave on October 24, 1945. With the new Norwegian doctrine of Teutonic-Nordic war, that is to say, NATO war against Russia, Quisling has jumped out of his grave, and his doctrine has become Norwegian state policy.

Observers record that hatred of Russians and Russian culture is more intensely expressed and pervasive in Oslo than in any other west European capital. Once again, it is righteous in Norway to wage war against Russia for the advancement of the Teutonic-Nordic race and western civilization. To quisle, in short.

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by Editor - Thursday, June 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Existentially speaking — which means whether to live and let live, to do or die — how far from a mortal enemy is far enough? In between the one and the other outcome, is there anything but a no man’s land?  

Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed” – was a Roman strategic aim 2,200 years ago. It was regularly repeated in his public speeches by Marcus Porcius Cato in his advocacy of putting an end to the Punic Wars by destroying the Carthaginian adversary entirely, not just militarily, so that it could never rise again to challenge Roman power. The opposition slogan was Carthago servanda est – “Carthage must be saved”. Its author, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, meant don’t rule by force if it can be avoided;  instead conserve lives, resources, power.  

Cato was a politician; Corculum was a soldier. The political strategy of doing what you can because you can, and as a warning to everyone else, won out; Cato is remembered even now; Corculum is forgotten.  This is not because imperial history repeats itself, but because the history is always written by people aiming to stay on the winning side: they don’t know any better until the empire has been lost and their retainers with it.

In the evolution of the Russian war aims, former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Security Council, stood up for the Cato line last week. “Ukraine will disappear”, he declared. “Now it’s time to say how Ukraine will disappear, and also what will then be the risk of a resumption of the war in Europe and in the rest of the world.” Medvedev also left open the Corculum option after the Cato option in his last line. “We may be temporarily satisfied with the second option, but we need a third one.”

Because Russia is the only functioning democracy on the two sides of this war, where military tactics and war aims are openly argued in parliament and the media, the debate between the Cato delenda war aim, and the Corculum servanda war aim is an active one. Sworn to destroy President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and economy, the US, European and western allies misinterpret this debate to be vacillation and vulnerability. Dialectically speaking, this encourages the Cato line faction in Moscow at the expense of the Corculum line faction.  In this way the US and NATO axis provokes its own defeat.  

This process has taken the war well beyond the 300-kilometre range of some of the US, French or British weapons which have been deployed and fired to date. The debate over the 300-km westward defence line was winding up in Russia, not beginning, when winter started  last year.   

Medvedev made this official last week, following the intensification of artillery, rocket, and drone attacks on Russian cities, including Moscow. This week the governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, went further. Then yesterday President Putin (lead image, left) tried to pull Gladkov and Medvedev back in line —  that’s the Corculum line, not the Cato line.

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by Editor - Wednesday, May 31st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The man in the frame is General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

There are no insignia on his jacket, zipped tight to his chin. His torso and legs are concealed beneath the desk which also accommodates a computer screen without keyboard or mouse; and a pen held between the general’s right thumb and index finger, upside down and useless. Patriotic slogans have been pasted to the wall. A wall socket accommodates a thick communications cable routed along the base of the wall, but not visibly connected to the two telephones. There are ten unopened water bottles on display, six plastic cups. A single piece of paper on the desk reveals no date. The general is able to say a dozen scripted words and raise his left hand.

He is not dead from the Russian missile attack which had caused his disappearance until this video clip was published on Thursday evening to dispel what the Ukrainian introducer called the mystery and the Russian propaganda of  Zaluzhny’s death. The clip proves the opposite of this  intention. The general is visibly unwell and is no longer capable of commanding the Ukrainian forces.

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by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“He was not a nihilist for nothing!”

This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines, written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian literature.

Appearing to come out of the stream of consciousness of one of story’s characters, the line is also an irony of Turgenev’s — and if you understand that he meant nihilist as a synonym of Russian, it is a warning of great philosophical force for right now. Right now is a synonym for June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded to destroy the Russians; and for June 24, 1812, when Napoleon tried the same. Those two names can’t be synonyms for Biden because the German and the Frenchman weren’t demented or led by psychopaths.

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by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is a primer on the way the wind has been blowing since the Ukrainian ammunition  stockpile was blown up at Khmelnitsky in the early hours of May 13.

Radiation measurements in the western Ukrainian city appear to have risen sharply on May 13 and 14, indicating that British-supplied depleted uranium shells for anti-tank warfare had been detonated. The radiation-level spiking caused by the release of the depleted uranium (DU) has been denied by Ukrainian officials.  

US media reported on May 15 that “while not all of the facts and information about the multiple strikes on Western regions of Ukraine have been fully established, there are several elements to the viral conspiracy narrative that are provably false, misleading or lack evidence.”  “While Newsweek could not rule out the possibility that the ‘depleted uranium’ shells provided by the U.K. had been stored there, past reports about the nature of these munitions put a big question mark over that claim.”

Newsweek endorsed Ukrainian government agency claims. “Energoatom, the National Nuclear Power Company of Ukraine, said in its official Telegram channel that ‘the radiation level at the industrial site [in Khmelnitsky] and in the surrounding regions is at a level corresponding to the normal operation of power units and does not exceed natural background values.’”

A statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeated the Ukrainian government claim without publishing independent radiation measurements of its own. The IAEA was reported by Newsweek as having “poured cold water over the claims. “The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency today that there have been no measurements of elevated levels of gamma radiation in the country’s western regions in recent days,” a representative of the international body told Newsweek in an email.”  

Social media from the region have indicated a rapid exodus of the population in the vicinity of the blast.  Anti-radiation measures have been introduced for the residents of the Ternopol region, which neighbours Khmelnitsky to the west.  

The wind has been blowing northwest into Poland since, and raining. The Polish state Atomic Energy Agency (PAA) has been reporting radiation-level spiking since May 15. The highest measurements have been reported at Lublin and Krakow in the south, and then Gydnia, a port on Poland’s north coast.

On May 19 in Moscow, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council, said the “elimination [of the Khmelnitsky stockpile] has caused a radioactive cloud that is now moving towards Western Europe. An increase in radiation levels has already been registered in Poland.”   Patrushev was repeating what the PAA had already confirmed.

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by Editor - Monday, May 22nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a grave risk that in three weeks’ time US and NATO forces will attempt direct combat against Russia.

The operational plan is to strike from Romanian airspace in the south and the Baltic states in the north, in camouflage of the NATO exercise called “Air Defender 23”,  and under cover of US F-16 fighter aircraft purportedly operated by Ukrainian pilots but fuelled, directed, and guarded by more than two hundred US and NATO aircraft, including the most advanced US air war fighter, the F-35.  

“This [is] the largest deployment exercise since the foundation of NATO”, according to the cover story published by NATO headquarters. “   Commanded at US bases in Germany, ostensibly led by German officers, a Bundeswehr “fact sheet” claims “100 [US] Air National Guard aircraft from 35 different states will make the leap across the Atlantic to participate in Air Defender 2023. In addition to the world’s most modern jets, the F35, more than 20 different types of aircraft and Airmen from 24 nations will practice air warfare operations together over Germany, but also over eastern Europe on the NATO border. Among them Eurofighter, F18, F16, A10, [Saab] Gripen jets.”  

Including the Ukrainian regime in Kiev as one of “our partners in East and South-Eastern Europe”, the German military announcement says “we want to promote collective defense of common values (freedom, democracy, prosperity) – attack on one NATO nation is an attack on responsiveness of airpower – Allied air forces are first responders.”

Camouflaging US direction of the combined NATO attack operations from the Ramstein base in Germany, headquarters of the allied air command in Europe, are two parallel operations.  “Two NATO exercises, RAMSTEIN DUST for NATOs Deployable Air Command and Control capability, the DARS,  and RAMSTEIN GUARD for Electronic Warfare are linked into our exercise.”     

In design since the start of the Russian Special Military Operation in February 2022, this plan of US and NATO air operations against Russia follows the defeat of the Ukrainian ground forces at Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and the strategic defeat of the US Patriot missile system at Kiev by the Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile on May 16.

The use of NATO exercises to conceal active attacks on Russian targets was first demonstrated last September when the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up following the BALTOPS naval exercise.  More recently, on May 13 a US-directed ambush of Russian aircraft was rehearsed  when an Su-34 fighter-bomber, an SU-35 air-defence escort, and two Mi8 helicopters were hit simultaneously and downed in Russian airspace,  over Bryansk region.  

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by Editor - Sunday, May 21st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Evidence from the US Air Force (USAF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released in federal court this week ahead of a bail hearing for Jack Teixeira, the junior airman accused of leaking top secret Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) briefing papers, reveals that Teixeira was under close surveillance and official investigation from September 2022 through February 2023. That is six months before he allegedly printed out the JCS documents, and then published photographs of the papers on a social media site.

The new USAF and FBI evidence records Teixeira pocketing handwritten notes of what he had been reading; there is no evidence of his being able to print out copies of the documents.

The court hearing, held on Friday afternoon May 19 in US federal district court in Worcester, Massachusetts, ended in a ruling by Judge David Hennessy to deny bail for Teixeira and keep him in prison while his state trial is prepared.  “The danger he poses to the community is a grave one,” Hennessy said during the 45-minute hearing. “Court states the relative law with respective to this matter,” the court clerk has recorded in the case docket. “Court grants the Government’s motion for detention, ordering the Defendant detained, and states reasons therefore.”

 “The decision was a victory for the government, which is seeking to send the strongest possible message to potential leakers”, the New York Times reported from the courtroom.  

The evidence revealed by the government , which the newspaper and every other mainstream and alternative medium in the US are failing to report, demonstrates the opposite.

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by Editor - Friday, May 19th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is a tale about whales and Russians. In the telling, it has surprised even its author. A university professor from Oregon, he belongs to that seagoing pod which, like the North Pacific right whales,    is a seriously endangered species right now — that’s the American exceptionalists.

Ryan Tucker Jones’s book, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling, was published this month.  It has yet to be noticed in the Russian press. One reason is that the history of Soviet whaling and Russian fishing is no secret at all in Russia. The second reason is that the secret Russians know about Greenpeace and other campaigns against whaling that are part of the long US war against Russia is not one Jones has recognised, nor does he appreciate the damage these protests have done to the ecological protection groups of Russia in their domestic battle with the Russian oligarchs. Instead, he endorses what he calls the Greenpeace plan “to hit more directly at the Soviet economy” when that organisation moved on from campaigning against US and French nuclear bomb testing to  targeting not only Soviet whaling in the North Pacific, but also Soviet fishing.  

The final reason is that the way Jones tells his story in a fashion that ironizes, sarcasticises, and misrepresents the whaling story, turns out to be blubber that has been cut up,  boiled,  and coloured into margarine for the last time to be spread on Russian toast in the mornings. That’s exceptionalism for you.

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by Editor - Thursday, May 18th, 2023
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