By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command bunker he thought was secret. Then you can check the life expectancy of a Russian pig.

The losses of the former are Russia’s tactical gains; they aren’t yet victory in the war.

But it’s the latter, the Russian pig who, upon turning into pork, is breaking through the enemy’s defences towards strategic victory of Russian economic power to capture a world market. This means defeat – unrecoverable loss of market share – for the hostile states led by the once powerful pork exporters, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and the US. As the most recent European Union pig and pork slaughter data show,  the war is pushing up the energy and feed costs of pig farming,  and drastically cutting European exports of pork to the Asian consumer market, the biggest in the world. Also now, the Chinese government is on the point of deciding who to favour if Beijing allows a limited lifting of the African Swine Fever (ASF) ban  — the Russian pig or European and American pigs.

Behind the Ukraine front, the test of who is winning the war against Russia is also who puts their money and their meat where their mouth is. In Russia, meat consumption is rising per capita to a level never recorded before in Russian history.  At the same time, the country has become the world’s fifth largest pork producer.

“Practically speaking,” says Yury Kovalev, “we no longer have imports, but not because this is closed, but because over the past fifteen years an entire industry has been created, production has grown every year, and we have almost completely abandoned import dependence.”  Kovalev is general director of Russia’s National Union of Pig Breeders.

“For us, export is now the main direction for growth. Back in 2019-2020, Russia reached about 200,000 tonnes of exports, which is about 5% of our total production. In 2023, the export of pig products can reach 220,000 to 230,000 tonnes. The main strategic challenge of the Russian pig industry in the next ten years is to enter the top-5 of world pork exporters. To [achieve that] it is necessary to double exports to at least 350,000 to 400,000 tonnes; that’s up to 10% of domestic production.”

On current projections, Russia’s pork exporters expect that by the end of 2025 – one year beyond the battlefield defeat of the Ukro-NATO forces – the profitability of Russia’s pig exporting companies will depend on rising export demand, especially in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. This, the exporters say, will require accelerated growth in grain output to feed the pigs, which in turn depends on low to stable fertilizer, fuel, other energy and grain prices.

These are Russia’s strategic advantages in the present war. They are killing the profit margins and competitive advantages of the US-NATO side, and forcing the allied states to trade between themselves. This is the thin end of the NATO sausage.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a London courtroom last week, lawyers for the British government and the presiding judge, Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image, centre), revealed they will resist the efforts of the Dawn Sturgess family to obtain a multi-million pound settlement in compensation for what they claim, and the government says, was her death five years ago from Novichok poisoning by Russian state agents.

Secrecy is the key, not only to the big money claim, but to the government’s aim to defeat it and at the same time preserve the official story that the Kremlin ordered and carried out the chemical warfare attack in England in 2018.   

Lord Hughes is defending the government’s effort to keep secret enough of the evidence in the case to block Adam Straw KC (lead image, left) and Michael Mansfield KC (right),  the Sturgess family lawyers, from demonstrating that the British security services should have known in advance – and did know enough — to have protected Sturgess from the Russian cause of her death. Their argument has been that for this negligence a very large sum of money should be paid to Sturgess’s heirs, to Rowley, and to the lawyers.

The judge, the government, and the lawyers have agreed, however, there is one secret they must all keep. Sergei Skripal, the original target and survivor of the Novichok attack allegations in the official narrative, must never be allowed to testify publicly to what he knows.

To cover this up, Straw, Mansfield, and a lawyer representing the British press lied in court last week, claiming they want “open justice” from the secret services and the police. According to Jude Bunting KC  representing the media, “open justice is about avoiding ill-informed speculation about proceedings and, insofar as material is in the public domain because of assertion, or even because of state-sponsored [Russian] misinformation, that is all the more reason for disclosing that material in open rather than in closed.”

Hughes claimed to be seeking the same openness.  “One of the difficulties of this inquiry and this case…is that everybody popularly supposes that they know the answer. They may or may not be right, but the purpose of the inquiry is to find out.” Hughes was pretending.

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 11th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On March 5, in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), there was a fire-bombing of a French–owned brewery which destroyed 50,000 bottles of beer. On August 23, a private jet of the Wagner Group was bombed in the air north of Moscow, and the Wagner leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, were killed, along with five of their associates and three flight crew.

The connection between the two incidents is that Prigozhin’s methods of doing business in Africa cost him his life in Russia. The African business, not the mutiny at Rostov on June 23-24, is the fatal link.

It was the last straw. This is not a case of a soldier who lived by the sword and died by the sword. It’s the gangster who thought he was the capo dei capi, boss of bosses; and was brought down to earth because he wasn’t. To ignore the warnings that he had reached his multi-billion dollar operating limit, that he should stop muscling in on the competition, retire and keep his money  — these are well-known rules of American business, not to say mafia rules. But Prigozhin followed Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky in thinking Russian business is different. They thought there was no limit to their power to get what they wanted.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

What’s the truth of how Putin rules Russia?  

The longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia has followed Putin since their first meeting in St Petersburg in November 1991. This is the Putin story which has taken more than thirty years to prepare. It’s the story which the western and Russian media have missed.

Based on thousands of pages of court testimony in London and Moscow;  76 days of cross-examination of witnesses, including the only Russian minister of state ever to go into the High Court witness box; and the findings of fact and law by thirteen British judges up to the UK Supreme Court, this is the only book to investigate the truth.  

And to reveal how it bears no resemblance to US and NATO war propaganda.

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Doctors in hospitals for the criminally insane have reported that the sharpest pain patients with superiority complexes suffer is the belief there are others who are more superior than they are. Unless they are stopped, they kill to cure.

US exceptionalism is a disease of this type.  The American exceptionalists believe that if the US isn’t conquering and victorious —  great again as in MAGA —  it is defeating itself because, they think, the US can never be beaten by a foreign adversary on the field —   not on the battlefield, nor in the marketplace, nor in the mind and on the page. So this is where the whitecoats arrive today:  the Russian General Staff and the Stavka  are defeating the Americans on every front, weapon system, intelligence summary, and mind. This has never happened before. Failing to see and understand this is delusional; those who kill to cure this aren’t all hospitalised.

A book repeating the US, NATO and Ukrainian version of how and why Russia’s Ukrainian battlefield campaign began on February 23, 2022, is symptomatic, nothing new. “We have no idea of exactly how the conflict will end”, concludes Owen Matthews (aka Bibikov) in a fresh publication from the state-subsidised printing press of Rupert Murdoch. But “we already know how it will not end. There will be no complete victory for either Russia or Ukraine. NATO is too invested to allow Kyiv to fall to the Russian army… this war will eventually end — with a negotiated peace.”*

Incomprehensible to Matthews is that the terms of the negotiated peace will be those of the Russian non-aggression treaties for the US and for NATO of December 17, 2021,  and they will be dictated at the end of the war by the force which prevails. They will be as definitive as the German terms signed by the French in the Compiègne Wagon on June 22, 1940;   and the American terms signed by the Japanese on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.  

Instead, Matthews dismisses the treaties in two paragraphs, based on what Matthews says an anonymous British Foreign Office official told him in March 2022 was “fantastical…[they] simply did make any sense…there was nothing in it that NATO could possibly agree to.”

What preceded, and also what followed those treaties, was the doing, in Matthews’s  psychopathological terminology, of “fantasies about anti-Russian fascists coming to power in Kyiv”; “paranoia over Western attempts to subvert and undermine Russia”; and other “lies and eschatological fantasies”. At the centre of this madness, according to Matthews, is the single figure of Vladimir Putin, advised by “Soviet-era fantasists and paranoiacs”; “on the point of paranoia about the [corona] virus”; “secluded and inaccessible in his Covid bunker”; obsessed by pseudo-historical revenge and “a kind of death cult”; surrounded by “the most deluded and most ideologically driven members of Putin’s entourage”; and speechifying “a set of unbelievably illiterate  conspiracy clichés…especially when the former Marxists in the Kremlin sincerely believed that inexorable historical forces were on their side.”

There is no question in Matthews’s diagnosis of who is in the madhouse, and who is superior. “By the time I met [Vladimir] Zelensky in Kyiv in July [2022] he cut a profoundly impressive figure – hard-eyed, emphatic in his speech.”

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
No Comments »

On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Thursday, August 24th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The month of August is for dead-heading the roses, so that there will be fresh blooms before winter. It is the time to charge empty vessels (lead image, rear).

Plato was mistaken to claim that empty vessels make the loudest noise; that depends not only on the vessels but on the implement and the force used to strike them. Jesus Christ, who isn’t known to have read the old Greek, fixed his mistake by pointing out that instead of banging on as Plato did, the empty vessel can be filled with something quite useful, like the spirit of God; in Jesus’s case, referring to the empty Paul of Damascus, Jesus meant Himself.  

Bears are more modest. This bear (lead image, front) prefers the company of readers, disclaiming disciples, state propaganda organs, substacks, and podcasters calling themselves judging freedom.  Accordingly, this bear recommends the usefulness of clear water to fill the vessel, and for splashing about when the heat of the day is at its peak.   

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, July 30th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the advertising Hall of Fame, three of the all-time winning slogans are “Just do it”; “Where’s the beef?”; and  “Good to the last drop”.  

Three Ukrainian army soldiers and a military press officer from Kiev  have pressed all three on the Financial Times of London, and they just hit the money, so to speak.

“Rather than dart across Russian minefields aiming to punch through enemy lines with Nato armour,” the newspaper is reporting, “Ukrainian forces have moved their focus to pounding Russian defensive positions with heavy artillery fire. Artillery gunners operating multiple-launch rocket systems and howitzers, some loaded with US-supplied cluster munitions, aim to clear pathways for small teams of sappers and infantry units. These troops then attempt to advance methodically on foot, moving forward one narrow tree line at a time in a select few spots along the 1,000-kilometre front line…  The painstaking strategy has raised questions in western capitals about whether Ukraine will be able to maintain it for long, or produce the kind of military breakthrough that would bring Moscow to the negotiating table… But in the short term, the tactic has reduced Ukrainian losses. Casualties and the number of prized western battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles lost in battle are down compared with the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, while Ukraine has made small but steady gains.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday night praised ‘very good results’ on the frontline”, the newspaper added.  

This is the advertising to keep the US, the NATO allies, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) just doing it — continuing the $41.3 billion in military beef and $115 billion in cash to the last drop.

The battlefield outcome in measurable Russian military terms cannot be a winning tagline because it is irrelevant to advertising success in public and political terms on the US and NATO side. “The so-called counteroffensive,” President Vladimir Putin told a reporter on Thursday, “this broad counteroffensive, started on June 4, 2023. This is an obvious fact, demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have engaged their so-called strategic reserves. As for the past few days, we can confirm that combat action has entered its intensive phase, to a significant extent. The clashes are primarily concentrated in what they call in the West the direction of the main attack – the Zaporozhye sector. Yesterday, there was serious military action within the area of responsibility of the 810th brigade of the Black Sea’s Naval Infantry and the 71st Regiment from the 42nd division of the Southern Military District’s 58th Army…The enemy has not succeeded in any of the sectors of combat activity. All attempts at the counteroffensive have been stopped. The enemy has been forced to retreat with substantial losses. Today, they tried to recover the damaged assets, as well as pick up the wounded and casualties after leaving them on the battlefield yesterday but were also dispersed. This is the current situation as of this moment.”  

The men and the materiel are being lost, but not the money. The latter is winning; the former is losing but doesn’t count.

There is also a process of the “Ukraine gaining admission to NATO piecemeal”, as the Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko described it to Putin on July 23.  “Tearing off this western piece of Ukraine: under the guise of NATO accession, to mislead the population. They want to chop off western Ukraine and join it to Poland. This is the payment for the active participation of the Poles in this operation, against the forces of the Russian Federation, of course. This is supported by the Americans. I told you this a long time ago, we witnessed this six months ago and discussed it preliminarily. Why am I telling you all this? It is unacceptable to us, Mr Putin. It is unacceptable to tear off western Ukrainian, dismember Ukraine and hand over these lands to Poland. And if, naturally, the western population of Ukraine needs this, we will be supporting them, of course.”

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, July 28th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When the Ukrainian and NATO forces have lost their war in eastern Ukraine by Christmas, what will happen to the rump of western Ukraine?

The Russian warning, issued last Friday at the Security Council by President Vladimir Putin,  is that the Russian Army will defend western Ukraine, known as Galicia, from any attempt at intervention by Polish forces under either a NATO “peacekeeping” formula, or a bilateral defence arrangement between the Kiev regime and Warsaw to slip Galicia under NATO Article Five protection.

Putin’s warning was concrete, explicit, geographically limited. It applied to the current western borders of the Ukraine, the eastern border of Poland, and the Polish-Belarus border. “I would also like to remind you what Poland’s aggressive policy led to. It led to the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland’s Western allies threw it to the German wolf, the German military machine. Poland actually lost its independence and statehood, which were only restored thanks in a large measure to the Soviet Union. It was also thanks to the Soviet Union and thanks to Stalin’s position that Poland acquired substantial territory in the west, German territory. It is a fact that Poland’s western lands are a gift from Stalin. Have our Warsaw friends forgotten this? We will remind them.”  

The Warsaw friends weren’t the only audience Putin intended. His warning is also addressed to the Berlin friends, the Baltic friends, the Paris, Brussels, and Budapest friends, and of course, the Washington friends.  In December 2021, they were offered the terms of mutual security and non-aggression in Europe in treaties for the US and NATO tabled by the Russian Foreign Ministry.  They were dismissed in diplomatic negotiations lasting less than a month.  

By Christmas of this year, as Putin has just pointed out, the Ukrainian army and the NATO forces will have expended their capacities to continue the fight. “The whole world sees that the vaunted Western, supposedly invulnerable, military equipment is on fire”, he added. What can happen next is “an extremely dangerous game, and the authors of such plans should think about the consequences.”

This is a warning that if the Poles move east, the Germans will be motivated to move east as well, in order to recover the Prussian territories Germany lost in its defeat and capitulation at the end of World War II. Hungary too will be motivated to change its northeastern border in order to rescue the ethnic Hungarian population of Transcarpathia in southwest Ukraine.

In short, Putin was announcing that “Stalin’s gift”, as he called it, was the stability of the post-1945 territorial settlement. Now, in defeating NATO’s attempt to destroy the Russians east of Kiev, the Russians are warning afresh that if NATO attempts to change its defence lines west of Kiev,  the Russian army will dictate an entirely new territorial settlement in which NATO will be an even bigger loser of military capacity and territorial extension than the non-aggression treaties of December 17, 2021, offered.

The 1990 promise of not one inch eastward for NATO  is reversing by one thousand kilometres westward.  

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, July 26th, 2023
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Vladimir Zelensky has enough fingers to count that $115 billion is worth almost three times more than $41.3 billion.

The first number is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) calculation of  “external support over 2023–27 involving sizable official financing in the form of grants and concessional loans, as well as debt relief.”  This includes “SDR [Special Drawing Rights] 11.608 billion (577.01 percent of quota, about US$15.6 billion).” No IMF member state has ever been allowed to take a six-times multiple of its borrowing quota at this money volume except for the Ukraine. Nor has any IMF member state ever been authorised by the IMF board of directors to stop new domestic bank lending and postpone all borrowing obligations (“current debt standstill”) for at least another three years from this Christmas.

The resulting money pile the IMF calls “the wartime liquidity surplus”.

Converting this into the Ukrainian banks’ profit line and diverting that into individual cash and assets, Kiev officials have told Reuters to report as the “Ukraine banks’ robust health.” “Across the banking sector,” the New York-based propaganda agency reports,    “deposits are as abundant as they’ve ever been, and the country’s lenders have found ways to remain profitable.”  This is being done, they explain,  by borrowing more and more in government bonds at a 25% interest rate guaranteed by more IMF money flowing into the central bank; lending less and less to zero for customers; and ignoring the increasing pile-up of defaulted, non-performing,  or fraud loans.

This is Zelensky’s pyramid, even Reuters and its Ukrainian banker sources imply, though the IMF staff cannot bring themselves to say so. “In the current context, Ukrainian bankers note, the choice makes sense. “’We will only survive if the government survives,’ [Privatbank chief executive Gerhard] Boesch sums up.”  

The big money number dwarfs the Pentagon’s most recent estimate  that “the Biden administration has committed more than $41.3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.” The new July 7 number includes deliveries of Patriot missiles, HIMARS rockets, cluster bombs, and “dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICM”. Using the banker’s term, the Pentagon announcement declared “the Ukrainian forces have effectively leveraged assistance…So we will continue to provide Ukraine with the urgent capabilities that it needs to meet the moment, as well as what it needs to keep itself secure for the long term from Russian aggression.”

When President Zelensky’s hands reach for his pockets, the calculation of “leverage” applies a liquidity risk discount for goods compared to cash; arms and ammunition cannot be diverted with the same profitability as cash. This is also because Pentagon delivery controls are more closely enforced on the ground than the IMF can follow the cashflow once it leaves the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and enters the oligarch banks now nominally nationalised.

It is thus clear that Zelensky’s pyramid is much more lucrative than the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and General Staff  pyramid. This is why the war on the battlefields of the east is also a war of the two pyramids in Kiev.  

To manage this war, the IMF uses its hands to pull the other leg. In the current IMF staff  report it calls the war of the pyramids “progress in governance, anti-corruption, and rule of law reforms.”

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, July 26th, 2023
No Comments »