By Margarita Menshikova, translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On the day before Good Friday (Orthodox), Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu reported at the Kremlin to President Vladimir Putin that at Mariupol,  inside the Azovstal steel works, about two thousand troops remain underground, including foreigners. Putin issued the following order: “There is no need to penetrate these catacombs and crawl under these industrial facilities. Seal off the industrial zone completely.”  

Four days earlier on April 17, the Defence Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov told the press that “up to four hundred foreign mercenaries were trapped [at Azovstal]… Most of them are citizens of European countries, as well as Canada. We have already reported earlier that radio conversations between militants in Mariupol are conducted in six foreign languages”  

Today, an unusually detailed report by the Moscow internet broadcaster Tsargrad was published to signal the strategic significance and political value of the NATO officers in their command bunker under Azovstal.

by Editor - Sunday, April 24th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If you understand the war in the Ukraine as the US operation to fight to the last Ukrainian for as long as required to save the Democrats at the November election and conceal the most incapacitated president since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in October 1919, how well is it going?

And if you understand the war as the Russian operation to defeat the NATO attack against Russia through the Ukraine, and its neighbours, what is the parallel answer?

In Washington, the war has steadied President Joseph Biden’s falling approval rating. If not for the war, Biden’s job approval on inflation and jobs, the direction of the country, and immigration would be crushing the small hope remaining that the Democrats can stave off the loss of both the House of Representatives and the Senate on November 8, and preserve their defence against the rising approval for Donald Trump’s re-run for the presidency in 2024. Biden is desperate for Ukrainian and Russian blood to keep flowing; and European too, if need be.

Score the war the best the Americans can hope for right now — but they have only six months left.

In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin and the Stavka  have completed their reassessment of Phase-1 of the campaign. As Putin told Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu in his report on the Battle of Mariupol on Thursday, “we have to prioritize preserving the lives and health of our soldiers and officers…. There is no need to penetrate these [Azovstal] catacombs and crawl under these industrial facilities. Seal off the industrial zone completely.” Putin explicitly identified the same territorial objectives as he had announced them on February 24 — “our people in Donbass [to] live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace.”  

Score the war according to the Russian plan — also according to the clock.

Putin has just stretched the time for the American, Canadian and other NATO officers directing the war from their Azovstal bunker to take Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s way out of Stalingrad – surrender, not suicide; then on trial testify to the war crimes of their commanders-in-chief.

by Editor - Thursday, April 21st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russians blame Americans, not Ukrainians, for the war, according to a new countrywide poll – and not Americans personally, but the US Government and US officials. Race hatred of Russians of the kind broadcast by the Anglo-American, European and Ukrainian media, is not reciprocated by the Russians towards their accusers.

by Editor - Tuesday, April 19th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“Tell me, please, Grandpa,” the little boy asked the Red Army veteran, “what does a war economy mean and how is it different from now?”

“Well, Yegorushka,” replied the old man, “our beloved President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin explained just this week: ‘I think commonsense should prevail, after all is said and done. And this is my great hope.’”

“But if the Americans want us to starve to death,” the little boy looked quizzical. “What does commonsense mean?”

by Editor - Sunday, April 17th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It’s a mark of civilized people that they keep and honour their old things.   When the things are broken, they put the pieces back together again.

In the 19^th century rural Americans of northeast states like Pennsylvania did this with their old tablecloths, dresses, and curtains, turning the remnants into patchwork quilts. Starting several  hundred years earlier, the Japanese, having to live in an earthquake zone,  had the idea of restoring broken ceramic dishes, cups, and pots. Instead of trying to make the repairs seamless and invisible, they invented kintsugi (lead image) – this is the art of filling the fracture lines with lacquer, and making of the old thing an altogether new one.

Quite quickly, the Japanese turned cheap lacquer fillings (urushi) into gold (kintsugi) and silver (gintsugi). In this way, a frugal custom of the poor working classes turned into conspicuous consumption of the rich leisure classes.*

The Ukraine is a new thing. Depending on which region, language,  religion, class, and ideology is displayed, it’s newness and oldness are disputable. New or old, however, the civil war in the Ukrainian east since 2014, Russia’s special military operation since February 24, and the US war — currently directed by US officers in the tunnels under the Azovstal factory — to destroy Russia in a fight to the last Ukrainian mean that the country cannot be put back together again the way it was. The Ukraine will have to be repaired and the damage replaced.

Kintsugi requires gold filling for the repaired cracks (lead image). This may not be quite the Ukrainian outcome the Americans, their German and British allies are insisting on, but they must contend with the Russian plan after the battlefield operations of Phase 2 are completed.  This, according to a Moscow source who knows it, is that the Ukraine will be destroyed and preserved in that state. “They don’t need to patch it,” the source says, “they need to keep it broken.”

by Editor - Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Now that the US and the NATO allies have taken from the Russian oligarchs their cash in foreign banks, their mansions, their boats and planes, and blocked the export of all private and corporate Russian capital abroad, Russia is freer to decide how to organize the capital investment of the economy. Freer, that’s to say, than Russia was when the Bush, then Clinton Administration installed Boris Yeltsin and his cronies in the Kremlin at the end of 1991; destroyed the parliament in 1993, and rigged Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996.

Freer too than Russia has been under Vladimir Putin’s policy of deoffshoreization – that policy fell through a loophole in 2015.  The price of their combined failures over thirty years has been more than one trillion dollars. That’s the sum of Russian capital outflow which started in 1992 and accelerated since 2000.  

In the calculation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Russia has been the only example in the world of an economy in which domestic economic growth has failed to reverse capital outflow, and to attract capital to return. Privatization in Russia has also been unique because it has accelerated the rate of outflow of domestic funds, enlarging the gap between domestic outflow and foreign inflow. Predictably,  this has led to the accumulation of a bigger Russian capital economy offshore than the domestic capital economy (except for housing); and a level of inequality of incomes which is today worse for Russians than it was during the last decade of tsarist rule ending in the world war and the revolution of 1917.    

Not so predictably, under the conditions of the war of the US and its allies to confiscate the offshore economy and destroy the domestic economy entirely, the Russian revolution of 2022 has commenced. It has begun with the passage through the State Duma last week of the new law to terminate all Russian share listings on foreign exchanges, and reorganize the Moscow stock exchange accordingly. Entitled “On Amendments to the Federal Law On Joint Stock Companies and Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”, and running for 22 pages, the revolution doesn’t start until Article 4 on page 14, buried under a series of articles revising the regulations for public company audits and accounts.

Also buried in the revolutionary new law is Section 9 of Article 6 on page 20. This provides the Russian government with the discretionary power to issue exceptions to the new law and allow foreign share listings, circulation and trade of securities for Russian companies which apply.

The Russian revolution of 2022 has a gaping loophole.

by Editor - Monday, April 11th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The allegation that the Russian leadership in Moscow ordered its soldiers to take a lethal nerve agent called Novichok to England and kill Sergei Skripal began on March 4, 2018, in the offices of the British prime ministry and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).  

Skripal himself and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, are the only direct witnesses of the alleged crime, of who committed it, what weapon was used, and what happened. Their names appear on the indictments and arrest warrants of the Crown Prosecution Service, and in statements to the House of Commons by the Prime Minister accusing Russian military intelligence agency officers of conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, use and possession of Novichok, and causing grievous bodily harm.  

For four years the Skripals have not been allowed by the British authorities to testify freely and in public. Sergei Skripal has not been heard or seen by his family members on a telephone for almost three years. Yulia Skripal has not been heard or seen on the telephone for a year and a half. Sergei Skripal may be dead; both of them may be in prison.

Can they, did they,  of their own free will recently communicate directly with a London lawyer named Adam Chapman (lead image, right), and request him to represent them in the official public inquiry, an investigation of the Novichok allegations opened last month by Lord Anthony Hughes, a retired judge (2^nd from left)?

Are Chapman and Hughes the first public witnesses in four years that the Skripals are alive, well, free, and able to communicate without control or coercion?

Through his principal legal advisor Martin Smith (3^rd left), Hughes was asked to say what he knows. His answers were given late yesterday. Judge what these answers mean, if anything.

by Editor - Friday, April 8th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The public inquiry opened in London on March 17 by Lord Anthony Hughes to investigate  allegations of the Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in July 2018 will employ a secret lawyer to make sure Sergei and Yulia Skripal will not appear; will not answer questions in public; and will not reveal what they know to challenge the British government’s version of the Novichok plot perpetrated by Russian assassins acting on Kremlin orders.

Adam Chapman was appointed last week by Hughes, who is heading the public inquiry which has replaced the inquest into the death of Sturgess, allegedly from Novichok poisoning. The official document naming Chapman and his London law firm Kingsley Napley was published on April 4.   

Chapman  is currently absent from his office on sabbatical leave;  he and two of his assistants, Jo Dorling and Katie Baker, do not respond to emails. Chapman, the assistants, and the spokesman for the Kingsley Napley firm, Michael Rosen, refuse to confirm that Chapman has met with the Skripals or communicated with them in any fashion. The lawyers have not verified that either Sergei Skripal or Yulia Skripal or both of them want Chapman as their representative in the Hughes investigation. The first public witnesses aren’t expected to testify in front of Hughes  until 2023.  

The government’s payment to Chapman to act for the Skripals makes it appear they are alive and not in prison. Chapman’s secretiveness indicates otherwise. Speaking this week for Chapman and Kingsley Napley, Rosen said: “we will not be commenting on this matter.”

by Editor - Wednesday, April 6th, 2022
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By R.K.Raghavan and Ajay Goyal, Mumbai*
  @bears_with

We now have a first-class international crisis on hand — a man-made crisis of the kind that comes once in millennia and causes empires to fall.

We may not, as some observers put it, be witnessing a world war. But we are certainly braving a “war of the world”. Though the guns have not yet fallen silent, a new world order is already here. While the war is taking place in Ukraine, which for centuries has been a battlefield between European and Russian armies, the real conflict is between the United States, its allies and Russia. US and NATO leaders have repeatedly stated that the western military alliance NATO has never been more united than it is now.   

Students of history and international relations will ponder through history to judge whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine was avoidable and why, despite its enormous power, the United States and Europe did not come to Ukraine’s aid. President Putin had conducted reluctant diplomacy last year with President Joe Biden over Ukraine’s “de facto” NATO militarisation; claimed continuing violation of Minsk agreements over the status of Donbass; Putin repeated the warnings he has been making for nearly fifteen years that NATO’s eastward expansion would  lead to a conflict. Western weapons, trainers and military experts have been making a beeline for Ukraine for the last eight years since the 2014 violent regime change which ousted the pro-Russia President of Ukraine from Donbass and set the stage for this conflict.

by Editor - Tuesday, April 5th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is not, repeat not, the tar baby story of the Afro-Americans and American Indians. The US and NATO allies aren’t the fox, Russia isn’t the rabbit, except that the Ukraine is the tar baby.  

The reason US commanders were confident Russia would move into the Ukraine when they did was that they made certain the Russian General Staff understood that if they failed to move west, they would be attacked themselves east across the Ukraine front, north against Belgorod and Voronezh, south against Crimea and Rostov;  and at the same time the US would launch its blitzkrieg to destroy the Russian economy. The Ukrainian plan of land attack was the feint; the sanctions war was the main thrust at Moscow.  

In last year’s manual of what is called the Russian Strategic Initiative of the US European Command in Stuttgart, the Russian Army’s strategy of “active defense” was reported to start with “preventative measures taken before a conflict breaks out, to deter it”.  Thereafter  would follow “a defensive-offense that envisions persistent engagement of an opponent throughout the theatre of military action to include critical infrastructure in their homeland, executing strategic operations that affect an adversary’s ability or will to sustain the struggle.”  Aiming at “achieving surprise, decisiveness and continuity of strategy action”, the US command has been expecting Russian “warfighting defined by fire, strike and maneuver where tactical formations engage each other at distance”.

The Russian “calculus”, according to US Army figuring, “is that the center of gravity lies in degrading a state’s military and economic potential, not seizing territory.”

Since the war plan for the US to destroy Russia required eight years of fitting out the Ukraine as a gunship, what has been surprising in the first phase of the war? What can be anticipated to happen next in Phase 2, then Phase 3, and Phase 4 – that’s the long war President Biden, Chancellor Scholz, and Prime Minister Johnson think they can sustain in the belief the Russians cannot?

by Editor - Sunday, April 3rd, 2022
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