By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

With these new words (lead image),    President Donald Trump has now obliterated – his word for the US attack on Iran on June 22, 2025  – whatever President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been calling the “understandings” they negotiated at the summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 16.  

Capitulate or obliterate.  That is, and always has been, Trump’s foreign policy for all states, but especially the states capable of defending themselves by effective force – Russia, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Venezuela, Houthi Yemen, Hamas Palestine, Hezbollah Lebanon, India, China. What Trump has just said of his regime-change offensive against Venezuela applies to all. What stops such a policy is no longer words, especially not the words, “red line”. Only counterforce – and that means, to use Trump’s term, “kill them dead”.

In recent US warmaking history there is precedent. That is the body bag count which, together with the domestic inflation and unemployment rates, ended the Vietnam War – first with the words of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 (for which Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize), and then with the North Vietnam Army’s and Viet Cong’s force of the US rout from  Saigon of 1975 (no prize for Kissinger).

For the time being, the Kremlin insists the “understandings” Putin agreed with Trump in Anchorage continue in effect. “I wish to officially confirm,” declared Foreign Minister Lavrov on Tuesday (October 21), “that Russia has not altered its positions from the understandings achieved during the extensive negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska. These understandings are grounded in the agreements reached at the time, which President Trump succinctly summarised when he stated that what is needed is a long-term, sustainable peace – not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere. We remain fully committed to this formula.”           

This “formula” is also promoted by the two strongest allies of the US in the Kremlin – Kirill Dmitriev, the president’s special emissary for wealth transfer to the US; and Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Central Bank. In a misleading tweet, and then in anonymously leaked remarks  to CNN in Miami, as he prepared to meet Steven Witkoff on October 25,  Dmitriev said: “[I have] arrived in the U.S. to continue the U.S.–Russia dialogue — visit planned a while ago based on an invitation from the U.S. side. Such dialogue is vital for the world and must continue with the full understanding of Russia’s position and respect for its national interests.”  He told CNN he was engaged in “official talks just days after President Donald Trump announced tough new sanctions on Russia, sources with knowledge of the visit exclusively told CNN on Friday ’to continue discussions about the US-Russia relationship,’ according to the sources.”  

“I think we are reasonably close to a diplomatic solution that can be worked out,” Dmitriev added in what Tass acknowledged was his interview with CNN.  

Dmitriev’s promotion of his personal role in direct negotiations with US officials has been repeatedly blocked in Riyadh and then in Anchorage by Lavrov and others.

In her policy announcement on Friday (October 24), following a 50 basis-point cut in the Central Bank’s key rate to 16.5%, Nabiullina acknowledged  that her policy is to cut GDP growth in Russia to zero plus statistical error. “Considering its actual dynamics, we have lowered the GDP growth forecast for 2025 to 0.5–1.0%.” What she meant by the “actual dynamics”, Nabiullina explained are the state policies for warfighting against the US and the NATO alliance on the battlefield which she opposes by calling them “pro-inflationary” and “geopolitical” risks: “Significant pro-inflationary risks have materialised since the previous meeting [September 12]. They are primarily associated with an increase in the budget deficit in 2025 and higher fuel prices…The expected increase in taxes will help bring inflation down over the medium-term horizon, but will also lead to a one-off rise in prices in the short term.”

According to Nabiullina, to reduce Russia’s inflation rate, there should be an end to the war on US terms. “Risks to oil prices have increased. The global oil market has shifted to a surplus. This might have a significant impact on prices. For Russia, the situation will be additionally complicated by the sanctions. There is persisting uncertainty related to geopolitics. Everything will depend on how the situation develops.”  

The domestic Russian opposition to this policy line is vocal but stops short of accusing Nabiullina and Dmitriev of betraying Russian interests.   “Western sanctions are nothing compared to the sanctions of the Central Bank,” State Duma Deputy Mikhail Delyagin, a former Yeltsin government economist and now Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, said in June.  Delyagin’s is the discreet manner of putting the position.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has attempted to deny that the General Staff’s policy  – the successful advance  of the Russian military on the Ukraine battlefield — is the reason for the high domestic approval of the Army and the President. They are not “correlated”, Peskov said in the Tass headline.  

 “Russians’ high trust ratings for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s armed forces are separate indicators that are measured separately, Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has told the media. ‘These are separate indicators that are measured independently. They are indeed very high right now,’ Peskov said, responding to a question about the correlation between the high trust ratings for Putin (77.8% according to VTsIOM) and the Russian Armed Forces (80%).”   

Listen to the new podcast on what is about to happen led by Dimitri Lascaris on Reason2Resist, held in Athens on Saturday morning.  

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, October 24th, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The daily record of Russian drone and missile strikes across the Ukraine shows not only an escalation in the scale and firepower of the electric war but also a new strategy of targeting designed by the General Staff.

The lead image shows the launch and strike points on the battlefield map which have been identified in the Ukrainian reporting over the evening of October 21-22.    

“In response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Russia,” the Defense Ministry bulletin, issued in Moscow on the afternoon of October 22,  has reported, “the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a massive strike tonight [October 21-22] with high-precision long-range ground- and air-based weapons, including Kinzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles at energy infrastructure facilities which support the operation of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine. The targets of the strike have been achieved; all designated targets have been hit.”    

From Kiev the impact of the strikes on the loss of electricity and the duration of power outages has been confirmed officially. The blackout in the eastern regions of the country now extends from early morning to late evening. “Ukraine was forced to introduce electricity shutdown schedules in 12 regions, Minister of Energy Svetlana Hrynchuk said on Thursday…Energy workers are forced to apply hourly shutdown schedules in 12 regions of Ukraine, the minister said. According to her, the restrictions will be from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. ‘Depending on how quickly the repair and restoration work is completed, we will adjust the schedules and hope that the burden on Ukrainians will be less,’ Hrynchuk noted. ‘Today, the enemy again attacked energy facilities purposefully, primarily in such regions as Sumy region and Chernigov region; there was also certain damage in Dnipropetrovsk region and Kharkov region,’ the minister said.”  

“The General Staff goal appears to be blackout east of the Dnieper and excess or lack of power generation in the west,” comments an expert source; he is an electrical engineer and veteran of NATO electric war campaigns. “If the Ukrainians can’t make up for the generation losses in the east via transfers from the west — which they won’t be able to do as the switch stations and transmission lines are being destroyed —  then it’s black-out in Dnepropetrovsk, Chernigov, Poltava, Sumy, and Kharkov. West of the Dnieper River, this could create a situation where the Kiev government will be forced to shut down reactors. The reason is that generating too much electricity can be almost as bad as not generating enough in terms of the effect on frequency. ”

“Another possibility is that the Ukrainians are being forced into desperate measures such as  emergency power transfers to the east. This can be detected in jury-rigging of high voltage tie-ins; not having the protection elements properly coordinated; reliance on damaged or dodgy switchgear. Combined, these factors are causing a cascading power losses in the east and west of the country, or at least parts of it.”

Parallel analyses reported by other sources confirm that “Russia is employing a new tactic aimed at completely disabling the energy system on the left bank of the Dnipro. This is creating an imbalance in power supply between western and eastern Ukraine: a critical electricity shortage is emerging in the east due to the destruction of thermal and hydroelectric plants, while a surplus of energy is present in the west, where nuclear power plants operate. This surplus cannot be effectively transferred eastward due to limited grid capacity.”  

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, October 23rd, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian state news agency Tass has announced the Budapest summit meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump is off for the time being after receiving a call to its Washington bureau from a source it identified as “a US administration official”.  

“The US administration has no plans to organize President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the immediate future, a US administration official told TASS, adding that there are no plans for an in-person meeting between the countries’ top diplomat either. ‘[US] Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,’ he said.”  

Tass had reported earlier in the day Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as cautioning: “We have the presidents’ understanding [that the summit will take place.] But you cannot postpone what hasn’t been announced.”  

Trump is uncharacteristically silent about what had just happened – and not happened. During the day he made no mention of Russia and Putin in a Rose Garden press conference;  he did not refer to the summit meeting in a tweet.  This is the first time in Trump’s second term that he has cancelled one of his major peacemaking initiatives in silence.

At the end of the afternoon Trump was asked “Do you know what happened there? And does that affect your decision whether or not to send Tomahawks to –“. “No, no,” he replied. “I, I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time. So, I’ll see what happens. But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They were all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them but this one. And I said go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries that are losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week. So, we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination [on despatch of Tomahawks].”  

Reuters reported “a senior White House official told Reuters ‘there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future’,   The US propaganda organ claimed the reason was that “Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations.”

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will brief Trump at the White House on Wednesday, October 22, Reuters added. “Two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans would be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields its demands.”

The Financial Times reported an unnamed White House official as telling the newspaper what had already been communicated to Tass an hour before.   

A meeting of European leaders, with Vladimir Zelensky attending, will follow in London on Friday, October 24.

Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin negotiator for US business deals, has attempted to sound hopeful in a post on his Twitter account. “Media is twisting comment about the ‘immediate future’ to undercut the upcoming Summit. Preparations continue.”  

Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid explaining the reasons for the failure of the Trump summit initiative, accompanied by threats of military and sanctions escalation. Also revealed are the surprises for Washington from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, October 21st, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The trick to making Budapest goulash is in the paprika – too little, and it’s just another meat-and-veg stew; too much,  and it will burn the tongue, trigger heartburn, cause flatulence.  

Sources in Moscow in a position to know believe that President Vladimir Putin convinced President Donald Trump on the telephone last week of three things. The first is that they can strike terms for a settlement of the Ukraine war by the time they meet in Budapest. The second is that Budapest can be a peace agreement for which Putin will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The third is that if Trump won’t agree on terms and escalates with more weapons, more Americans on the ground, and more sanctions,  he will lose the war, lose the lives of the Americans, and be forced into his very own Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021 – that’s to say, MALA, Make America Lose Again.

“It’s going to happen now,” the Russian sources say. When Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meets Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a few days’ time, the sources expect “there will be a deal from the Russian side.”

The catch, they also say, is that Putin can make his deal concessions so attractive that Trump is bound to agree, but at least three of his decision-makers may not. The Russian sources believe they are Vice President JD Vance, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, and White House advisor Stephen Miller. Others include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby. Together, the sources believe, they can be persuaded that the peace will in fact be a temporary pause in their all-fronts war against Russia. The sources say the temporariness of the peace and the pause in combat operations are also what the Russian General Staff will accept. No heartburn, no flatulence in the war rooms of Moscow and Washington; big relief in Russian business circles for the anticipated stop to sanctions enforcement, with snap back.

(more…)

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

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Vladimir Zelensky arrived more than thirty minutes late for lunch at the White House on Friday afternoon.  The Ukrainian delegation, which included Andrei Yermak, was already too late to dissuade  President Donald Trump (lead image) from backing down on his threat to send Tomahawk missiles through NATO to Ukraine for launching at Russian targets deep inside the country.

“We’ll be talking about that,” Trump replied to a Ukrainian reporter at the lunch table press conference. “That’s why we are here…Fair question, exactly as he [Zelensky] told you to say it. But we’re going to be talking about it.”  

Trump then told the press he foreshadows a delay in the decision on the missiles in order for a new round of negotiations to take place. “We need Tomahawks and we need a lot of other things we’ve been sending over the last four years…Hopefully, they [Ukraine] won’t need it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks.”  

Trump has agreed to Putin’s negotiating offer of the day before.

He has also accepted Putin’s refusal to accept Zelensky and Trump in a troika summit meeting together. “Most likely it will be a double meeting…we’ll be involved in threes but it may be separated.”  

Trump began covering his retreat on the eve of Zelensky’s arrival, when a reporter asked the President about his telephone call with Putin: “What did you tell them about the Tomahawks? Did you discuss the Tomahawk missiles?” Trump replied: “Well, we talked about it a little bit, didn’t say much, but I do say to you, you know, we need Tomahawks for the United States of America too. We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete for our country. So, you know, they’re very vital, they’re very powerful. They’re very accurate, they’re very good, but we need them too. So, I don’t know what we can do about that.”  

In Moscow Russian officials said that in the telephone conversation Putin had issued a counterattack threat, warning the Tomahawks and American crews operating them would be a target if they crossed the border. Putin also proposed to let their officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, negotiate next week. If they agreed, then Putin and Trump would hold a fresh summit meeting in Budapest.  

Emphasizing the counterattack, according to the readout of the telephone call from Yury Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs assistant, Putin told Trump:  “The Russian Armed Forces hold full strategic initiative along the entire line of contact.”   Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “Our military knows what to do, and they possess the strength and all the necessary resources. Everything will certainly be done to ensure, first, national security, and second, our country’s interests,”    

Following public reporting of the call, a source reflecting General Staff thinking commented: “The Tomahawks will be blown up in transit, hit at their launch sites, or shot down in flight. Of course, it will be another red line crossed, but I think Putin’s pen is out of ink at this point.”

“We’re not losing people”, Trump said across the table from Zelensky. “We’re not spending money. We’re getting paid for the ammunition and missiles and everything else we are sending… That’s not what we’re in it for. We’re in it to save thousands of lives…that’s why we’re in it…I love solving wars. You wanna to know why. I like stopping people being killed. And I’ve saved millions and millions of lives. And I think we’re going to have success with this war.”    Trump was conceding the risk of US casualties in the Ukraine is deterring his decision on the Tomahawks.

The day before, Trump had tried a smokescreen for what had been said in the conversation with Putin:  “I did actually say, would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition? I did say that to him. I said it just that way. He didn’t like the idea. He really didn’t like the idea. No, I said it that way. You have to be a little bit light-hearted sometimes, but no, he doesn’t want Tom — Tomahawk is a vicious weapon. It’s a vicious offensive of incredibly destructive weapon. Nobody wants Tomahawks shot at him.”  

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, October 17th, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

By the close of Thursday there was a difference of opinion between the Kremlin and the White House on what had taken place on the telephone earlier that evening between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.

More exactly, there had been argument over Trump’s threat to send long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles through NATO to the Ukraine for firing at the Russian hinterland.

In Trump’s summary, tweeted at 20:11 Moscow time, he said “great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” He said the main points of conversation were the Middle East peace plan; the Melania Trump initiative on the war-displaced children;  “a great deal of time talking about Trade between Russia and the United States when the War with Ukraine is over”; a new meeting between foreign ministers, Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov; and Budapest for the meeting to follow between the presidents.

In Ushakov’s summary, posted by the Kremlin an hour later at 21:10, the call had lasted “almost two and a half hours. Clearly, it was a rather substantive and at the same time very open and frank exchange.”  

The last phrase means there was serious disagreement. This was over Trump’s challenge to Putin’s military capacities as a “paper tiger” by the Tomahawk threat. According to Ushakov, “The issue of potential supplies of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine was also raised. Vladimir Putin reiterated his position that Tomahawks would not change the situation on the battlefield but would inflict substantial damage to relations between our countries, to say nothing of the prospects for a peaceful settlement.”  

Ushakov’s summary omitted to record what Trump had replied to Putin on this. Trump’s tweet didn’t mention Tomahawk at all. They did agree, Ushakov said, to transfer the argument to their subordinates for a meeting next week, and then to meet directly in a new summit in Hungary.

Ushakov’s readout of the call ended on the line: “Overall, I would say that the telephone contact between the Russian and US presidents was very useful, and the two leaders agreed to stay in touch.”

For the time being, Trump thinks his Tomahawk threat is working; Putin thinks he has delayed the move and made its cancellation the precondition for the Budapest summit.

(more…)

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

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Manipulating the US president to make his domestic and foreign policy decisions as Stephen Miller of the White House (lead image-3) is doing with President Donald Trump (lead image-2) is not new.

Jimmy Carter tried to dismantle the bureaucracy and the mindset (ideology) of the “imperial presidency”, as he called the White House during the election campaign of 1976. But then Carter fell under the spell of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; he controlled what the president was told was the evidence for his policy choices, the risks, and the consequences. In this way, Brzezinski more than influenced the policy outcomes Carter believed he was deciding for himself.

(One of them was the secret US war with the Kremlin in Afghanistan.)

Carter required that his decision-making process start and end on paper; he read reams of it in the personal study off the Oval Office.  He demanded his intelligence briefing every morning. However, connected by an internal passage of connecting doors, Brzezinski supervised what was in the papers and vetted who walked in the outer Oval Office door to have words with the President.  

Trump prefers pictures, screens of them, and he gets one intelligence briefing per week, followed by interpretation over lunch in the private White House dining room from Vice President JD Vance.  Miller controls the paper, especially the virtual posts, the press gaggles on aircraft in flight and airfields at takeoff and landing, and in the Oval Office. Vance coaches Trump through his misspeaking, memory failures, political gaffes.

Listen now to the way in which the method and purpose of these new men differs from anything in the history of the American presidency; and how the leaders of the European allies, the UK, and Canada exploit what they believe they know in order to get the policy decisions they want from Trump — that is, after Miller, Vance and others have decided and Trump has been persuaded.

Then once you understand, ask whether the calculations of the allies, and also of the main enemy at present, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, are misjudgements of what serves their national strategies best.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, October 15th, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the new podcast from Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid asks if President Donald Trump has decided to sell Tomahawk missiles to the NATO allies for attacking the Russian hinterland,  and why the allies are so keen to continue fighting the war when it is obvious the Tomahawk cannot turn defeat on the Ukraine battlefield into victory. Listen to the hour-long discussion here.  

The third question in the discussion is — what to make of Russian policy towards Palestine after the Arabs cancelled their long-prepared summit meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for October 15, and opted instead for a summit with Trump at Sharm el-Sheikh on October 13 – from which Putin was excluded?  Answer: Russian policy contradicts the US-Israeli plan for Gaza but they won’t say so in public nor will the Arabs countenance a confrontation with Trump right now. The podcast looks again at Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s attempt to explain the Russian reason to Arab journalists.

(more…)

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

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week, according to the New York Times,  the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was reported to have tried to head off President Donald Trump’s escalation to frontal military attack on Venezuela and regime change in Caracas by offering  “a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.”    Reportedly, Maduro’s terms included: “all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.”

If Maduro did that, Russian sources concede hypothetically, it would amount to his revocation of Article 6 and Article 10 of the “Agreement between the Russian Federation and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on Strategic Partnership and Cooperation”.      

The first provision of the treaty calls for “joint initiatives within the framework of OPEC+, the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries and other multilateral organizations, [to] promote balanced and stable long–term development of global energy markets without using artificial restrictions and unfair competition tools”. The second proposed to “cooperate in the energy sector in such areas as the exploration and development of new oil and natural gas fields, increasing the returns of fields operated by joint ventures and reducing their environmental impact.”  

Maduro signed the instrument of treaty ratification in front of the Russian Ambassador to Venezuela on October 7.  But that was several days after Maduro had been told the Trump Administration had purported his scheme to replace the Russian oil companies  with American ones, and had cancelled negotiations on Maduro’s term sheet led by Richard Grenell.   

For the time being, there has been no ratification of the Venezuelan strategic partnership treaty by the State Duma in Moscow. When Venezuela’s Ambassador to Moscow, Jesús Salazar Velázquez, visited the Duma on October 6, ratification was discussed but not agreed.  Instead, the official Duma communiqué reported that Velazquez had agreed with Duma deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov —  a Communist Party faction leader who ranks third in the parliamentary leadership — to “express solidarity in countering Western military-political and financial-economic pressure. Both sides noted the importance of inter-parliamentary cooperation as part of bilateral interaction and discussed the possibility of holding a meeting of the Russia-Venezuela and Venezuela-Russia parliamentary friendship groups via videoconference in the near future.”  

President Putin has twice stopped short of the opportunity to express his solidarity with Maduro. On October 2, during his appearance at the Valdai Club conference, Putin acknowledged that the French commando boarding of a tanker carrying Russian oil was “piracy”. Illegal yes, but Russia is not going to be provoked, Putin said.  The French “want very much to transfer the tension from inside the country to the external contour, to excite some other forces, other countries, in particular Russia, to provoke us into some vigorous actions.”   

Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats off the coast, which began in September and have been justified in Washington as an operation against drug smugglers, have not been explicitly condemned by the Kremlin. They have been called piracy by the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad.   

At Putin’s last opportunity, in a press conference in Dushanbe on October 10, he was asked: “It has just been announced that Donald Trump did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In your opinion: should he have received it, did he deserve it, was he worthy of it?” By then Putin knew the prize had been awarded to the US backed regime-change candidate to overthrow Maduro, Maria Corina Machado. In his reply, Putin ignored Venezuela and praised Trump.

“It is not for me,” he said  “to decide who should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize… There have been cases where the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to individuals who had done nothing for peace. In my view, these decisions inflicted enormous damage on the prize’s prestige. A person comes along – good or bad – and within a month or two, boom. For what? They had done absolutely nothing. Is that how it should work? It ought to be awarded for actual merits. Consequently, I believe, its prestige has been significantly undermined. But that is neither here nor there – it is not for me to judge. Whether or not the incumbent President of the United States deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, I do not know. But he has genuinely done much to resolve complex crises that have persisted for years, if not decades. I have said this before – I know for certain: regarding the crisis in Ukraine, he sincerely strives for a resolution. Some things have worked out, others have not. Perhaps much more can still be achieved based on the agreements and discussions in Anchorage. But he is certainly making an effort, certainly working on these issues – issues of achieving peace and resolving complex international situations.”  

CCCP — cold comfort for Caracas from Putin.  

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, October 13th, 2025
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Listen to Dimitri Lascaris, Slobodan Despot and me discuss the reasons why the weak and desperate governments of Europe and the UK want war with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTDuZnYwSk 

by Editor - Saturday, October 11th, 2025
No Comments »