By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Russia’s master icon painters depicted the male and female faces which are sacred in the Russian Orthodox Church, the noses were always columnar — a long, narrow bridge without curvature – ending in a pointed tip; the lips were exactly as wide as the nostrils on either side of the nose, and the lower lip was full. The cheeks were flat without the prominence of either zygomatic (cheek) bones or flesh. The eyes were always almond-shaped, open without hood (dermatochalasis). The lacrimal caruncle, the tiny circle of flesh in the corner of the eye, did not appear in icons until the seventeenth century.*

The forehead is usually wrinkle-free except that the Mother of God of Kazan displays a vertical line between and above the eyebrows. That glabellar or frown line isn’t from nature; it symbolizes different things, depending on the school of icon painters who painted her.

Realism in icons changes with time just as the secular standard of beauty does in the face. Rank and class, with the money to make plastic change and cosmetic repair, are eternal. Today, with more cash in their pockets, time to expose their skins to the sun on holiday, and the aspiration to rise in social class and display their mobility, Russian men and women are buying more botulinum toxin drugs than ever before. In the latest report this month, consumer spending and unit sales for these drugs are currently jumping by more than a third over the levels recorded a year ago;   they have more than doubled since the war began in 2022.  

Popularly known by the Botox brand name, these drugs are injected in time series to erase wrinkles in the muscular movement of the face, cause lips to pout, and lift hoods over the eyes. Botox is also used to stop excessive sweating, twitching, and drooling. These can be symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome among soldiers returning from the war fronts, but they aren’t the drivers of the Russian Botox boom.

This is not only a boom in consumption of the drugs on the faces of men and women.  It is a boom for Russian pharmaceutical companies to replace French, South Korean, Chinese and other imports of Botox-type pharmaceutical drugs which have been blocked by sanctions:  growth in sales for these Russian Botox makers has been jumping – over the past year, 46% and 63% for the two leading Botox substitutes, Relatox and Miotox.  Also, these products pack three to four times more punch in every shot, or so the Russian marketers, experts and clinics selling cosmetic treatments and plastic surgery are claiming.  

The Russian Botox comes to the people from the people; that’s to say the state.  Relatox, first started in the market in 2014,  is manufactured by Microgen, a subsidiary of the state conglomerate, Rostec.     Miotox is produced by the Chumakov Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences,  a national leader for research in medical virology, manufacturer and marketer.  

When Rostec’s chief executive, Sergei Chemezov, met President Vladimir Putin this month for their annual review of Rostec’s operations, Chemezov mentioned his group’s medical technology contributions to the war, including a new histological data scanner, bioelectric prosthetic devices, and “sponsored trips to health resorts”.  The Kremlin communiqué doesn’t report whether they discussed the boom in Relatox. .

The face-saving claims, not to mention the adverse side effects and the spread of counterfeit drugs, are sensitive subjects which the experts are willing to discuss in the press. There are greater sensitivities, however.  Nikolai Bespalov, an author of the latest Botox market report by RNC Pharma  in Moscow, and Natalia Goltyakova, chief executive of the  GMT Clinic,  were asked what are the social class dynamics of the Botox boom, and what oligarch groups are active in the market  in combination or competition with Rostec and Chumakov,  but they refused to answer.

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by Editor - Monday, June 30th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In warfighting against Russia’s enemies, President Vladimir Putin makes mistakes. He admits as much. Unequalled among the current leaders of the enemy states, he has the capability to correct his mistakes quickly. That’s one of the reasons for his unequalled domestic voter support.

Also, Putin is an attentive listener; he brooks criticism on condition it is not intended in a plan for regime change. Every ten years or so, Putin knows that Russia’s main enemies – the US, Germany, the UK – have come up with, will always come up  with regime-changing schemes employing Trojan horses, Fifth Columns and quislings inside Russia.

These started for Putin with the Chechen secession. After he had defeated that, they were followed by the plotting of the oligarchs around Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky and ended with Alexei Navalny. Putin is well enough educated in the methods of analysis of Marxism-Leninism to understand that for Russia, regime change and warfighting, also class struggle, race war and imperialism, are constant and inevitable.

Because of what the Germans did to the Russian people at the time of his father, mother,  brother,  and uncles, Putin knows there is only the deterrence of superior force to stop the Germans repeating themselves; killing Germans is a generational necessity for Russia’s survival. Putin wishes better but knows – especially now – that the good Germans are outnumbered and outgunned, and the bad Germans are planning for worse with US encouragement and armament, as before.  

With the British and the Americans, Putin has tried a combination of traditional economic inducements, regular espionage, and manipulation in the manner of Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Trust.* In the calculus of the force required for divide-and-rule and warfighting against the Anglo-American empires, Putin has also understood that time is needed to rebuild Russia’s capacities, economic and military, from the level of destruction which Washington inflicted through the time of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin capitulations. In correcting his predecessors’ mistakes and their misjudgements of the Americans, Putin has been a quick study but a slow learner.

Then there is Putin’s philosemitism in dealing with the Jewish state. Joseph Stalin believed Israel  to be an anti-imperial ally, but it has turned into a battleship for the empire in destroying all of Russia’s traditional Arab allies, and now Iran — the last holdout before Putin must fight a war on the southern front.

There, Putin’s policy towards Iran combines two hundred years of Russian trial-and-error, some of the errors fatal ones.   

In the tradition of male loyalties in the Russian tusovka – mishpocha is the Jewish concept – Putin is both comfortable with and dutiful towards the Jewish men he shared his Leningrad boyhood with. Such loyalty is lifelong.  No Russian can forget – even if Americans, Germans and British make a point and policy of forgetting  – that they survived the war but not their grandparents, fathers, brothers and womenfolk. Putin has been persuaded that the 15% of Israel’s population who are Russian by language, history, and habit are an extension of the tusovka to which he should show the loyalty which survivors must show each other.

There has been nothing comparable towards the Iranian side; towards the Arab world, genuine Russian sympathy and cultural orientalism died with Yevgeny Primakov (1929-2015). Ties of trade, investment, and military cooperation are a poor substitute, as unpredictable and as fraudulent as the spot and future markets in commodities, including money itself.

In this podcast recorded yesterday, Dimitri Lascaris discusses the lessons Putin and the Russian General Staff are learning from the Iran war, both to guide their next steps for the security of the southern front, and also for negotiating and fighting the war in the Ukrainian sector of the western front.

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by Editor - Friday, June 27th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump and the Israelis cannot accept that in this round of the war against Iran, they are losing escalation control.

Trump and the NATO allies will not accept that this is what Russia is taking from them on the Ukrainian battlefield.

In the history of the world it has never happened before that people with superiority complexes as all-consuming as Trump’s, the Israelis’, and the NATO leaders’ can’t see through the dark to their toilet, and when they get there to do their business,  they can’t flush because their electricity and water supplies have been destroyed by missile attack.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

According to the Unified Rules of Boxing issued by the US Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, when the bell sounds for the end of each round, there is a “rest period” before the boxers resume their fight, or one retires too hurt to continue.

The ceasefire between Israel and Iran which President Donald Trump (lead image, left, right) has congratulated himself for arranging is the bell sounding for the rest period to begin.

Iran’s rope-a-dope strategy allows rest periods.  But for this strategy to succeed, the rest periods must be too short for Israel to be re-supplied by the US, Germany and other allies, compared to the re-supply arrangements which Iran is now trying to make with Russia, China, North Korea and other sources.

Since Trump’s first announcement allowed Israel and Iran to continue striking each other for six hours, his deadline was roughly 7 am Teheran time today, June 24.  In reply, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, announced “there is NO ‘agreement’ on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations. However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Teheran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards.”   

According to Trump, “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’”   Trump has then claimed he had forced them. “We couldn’t have made today’s ‘deal’ without the talent and courage of our great B-2 pilots, and all of those associated with that operation. In a certain and very ironic way, that perfect ‘hit’, late in the evening, brought everyone together, and the deal was made!!!”  

Sources in Moscow say the terms of the Trump “deal” are quite different.

On the one hand, according to the sources, Trump understands that unless he orders a halt to US arms supplies and battlefield intelligence to the regime in Kiev, Russia will not halt its arms supplies and intelligence-sharing with Iran. The sources add that for the time being Iran is not requesting fresh Russian aid. “Several individuals have been moved under Russian protection; these are individuals and families who have been moved into Russia. North Korean deliveries have been crucial in the run-up — they are basically Chinese. So Iran has not been lacking. They have been ready.  Also, they have the capacity to fire several large missiles per day for several weeks, if not months, which the Israelis and Americans cannot stop. These will get through to Israel’s water, gas, and electricity plants, other fuel supplies, and ports.”

The assessment in Moscow is that Iran has demonstrated it has escalation control for the long term, and that in the short term Israel needs US re-supply, re-financing, and recovery more urgently than Iran. In exchange for Trump’s “ceasefire” to meet the Israeli requests, President Vladimir Putin has communicated that Trump must do nothing to block the acceleration of Russia’s offensive in the Ukraine.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Muhammad Ali famously demonstrated the rope-a-dope strategy in the Zaire title bout  against George Forman in October 1974, he allowed Foreman to start attacking him against the ropes in Round 3. By Round 7 Foreman had exhausted his punching strength. In Round 8, Foreman dropped his guard, and Ali counterattacked with a combination of punches which knocked Foreman out.  

Watch carefully how it was done in seven punches, eight seconds.   

According to General Daniel Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US has knocked out Iran’s nuclear enrichment and nuclear weapon preparation plants with “extremely severe destruction”;     “completely and totally”, according to President Donald Trump.   

The punches were delivered by “tactical surprise”, Caine has announced, with a “deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders here in Washington.” He said the “strike packages” comprised more than 125 aircraft and one submarine. They fired 16 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, more than 24 Tomahawk missiles, and a total of 75 precision-guided weapons at three land targets – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. According to Caine’s report, no Iranian shot was fired against the US attackers as they flew on to these targets nor “on the way out.”    Instead, “decoys” and “preemptive suppressing fires” were launched. “Iran’s fighters did not fly,” Caine claims, “and it appears that Iran’s surface-to-air missile systems did not see us. Throughout the mission we retained the element of surprise.”

The entire operation took 25 minutes. That’s the equivalent in the boxing ring of seven rounds. Iran reports the US had telegraphed its punches with advance notice that the bombing raid would be restricted to the three land targets.

Knocking out the Iranian leadership, including military and civilian leaders, plus Ayatollah Ali Kamenei, has been denied by Vice President JD Vance,   then reasserted by Trump.  

“No other military in the world,” said Caine, “could have done this.”

Iran has not acknowledged that rope-a-dope is its warfighting strategy. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepares for his meetings on Monday with Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has issued a warning to Russia and China that they are failing to do enough to meet longstanding assistance promises and treaty obligations. “We may forget the words of our enemies, but never the silence of our friends,” the IRGC media platform Sepahi News has announced just after midnight on Monday morning (June 23). “After going through this sensitive situation, there will undoubtedly be a serious review of relations with some countries.”  The text was accompanied by a picture of Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping together at a ceremony shaking hands.

The former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, spokesman for the Security Council, has issued a personal declaration supporting Iran’s war against both the US and Israel, and implying not only that Israel is losing the war,  but also there is Kremlin backing for the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. “The critical infrastructure of the nuclear cycle appears not to have been damaged or even slightly affected.  The enrichment of nuclear materials, and now we can say it,  the future production of nuclear weapons, will continue. A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their nuclear ammunition. Israel is under attack — thundering explosions, people in panic. The United States is drawn into a new conflict with the prospect of a ground operation. The Iranian political regime has been preserved, and with a high degree of probability it has become stronger.”  

“With such successes,” added Medvedev for the General Staff and intelligence services, “[we don’t see] Trump [winning] the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the utter venality of this nomination. Good start — congratulations, Mr. President!”  

This is Russian for rope-a-dope.

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by Editor - Monday, June 23rd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was just before high noon in Moscow on Thursday, June 19, when President Vladimir Putin initiated his telephone call to President Xi Jinping of China. A read-out by Putin’s foreign policy assistant, Yury Ushakov, followed almost immediately.  

Xi did not authorize his summary for twenty-four hours until the Chinese official media organ, Global Times,  published an editorial titled “The ‘four-point proposal’ injects stabilizing force into the crisis in the Middle East”.   Another official version from Beijing, delayed for nine hours, can be read here.  

In between Putin’s read-out and Xi’s editorial, the Russian General Staff leaked its assessment that the US, Israel and their allies are demonstrating in the Iran war,  as they have already demonstrated in the Ukraine war, that negotiations for a ceasefire, a truce, or a peace agreement are pointless now.

Pretending this isn’t so is the Kremlin consensus for the time being. According to Xinhua, repeating the pretence in public is also the Bejing consensus.  

Before he called Xi, Putin told the Xinhua press agency and other reporters: “we are ready and substantively guide the [Ukraine war] negotiations on the principles of settlement…We are in contact, our negotiation groups are in contact with each other. Only just now [Kremlin negotiator Vladimir] Medinsky asked — he says that only today he was talking to his counterparties from Kiev. In principle, they agree to meet after June 22.”  

Unspoken in public for the time being is the discussion among Russian political and military leaders on what Putin’s surprise statement revoking the terms of the Russian pact with Iran means to the remaining treaty allies, China and North Korea.  “With regard to the Strategic Treaty,” Putin has announced for the “Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation” he signed on January 17, 2025  — “there are no articles related to the defence sphere.”  

Moscow knows this is false.

According to a well-informed source, “the Iranians have assured Putin through the security people that they are able to hold out. Putin is not calling out Trump’s lies because there will be no burning of bridges with Trump for as long as possible. Nothing will be gained from this. Calling Putin out on Israel is something everyone is avoiding here and might be the most sensitive nerve. So it’s best avoided.”

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by Editor - Thursday, June 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Exaggerating the true fact to mean the false factoid is SOP (standard operating procedure) in information warfare. It’s to be expected from President Donald Trump (lead image, right) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and their intelligence chiefs (centre), military officers, and media supporters.

The truest of the facts in the war so far are arithmetic: (1) that the clock is showing five days and nights long; (2) that there is no lessening in the tempo of the Iranian barrages against Israel; (3)  that the Israeli counts of interceptions and target strikes represent less than 5% of US and Israeli estimates of Iran’s drone and missile stocks before the war.

There is more arithmetic. If Russia, China, and North Korea aim to re-supply Iran, there is no sign yet of increased shipborne deliveries from Astrakhan, Mahachkala and Olya, the Russian ports on the Caspian Sea, or from Turkmenbashi, the main port of Turkmenistan on the Caspian.     If President Vladimir Putin, President Xi jinping, and Kim Jong Un have agreed in secret to assist the Iranian side, then their deliveries are likely to travel by air and rail into Turkmenistan first, and then by road across the border at Sarakhs into Iran. For the time being, the reports at Sarakhs say “light traffic” and “currently no alerts”.  

Conclusion from these facts: Israel’s first shock-and-awe strikes have failed to produce a significant loss of Iran’s military capacities and political will to continue the war until Israel loses its capacities and will. Consequence of conclusion: if shock-and-awe fails, then schlock-and-flaw follows. Schlock is New York Yiddish for badly made merchandise, cheap junk.

This was demonstrated by Trump’s airplane remarks as he headed into Washington the night before his June 18 Situation Room session. Asked what end of war terms he is planning for Iran, he said: “An end. A real end, not a ceasefire. An end…[Question: So something that would be permanent?] Yeah, or — or, uh, giving up entirely…Certainly possible that they would give up. That’s possible.”  

This is the schlock. For analysis of the flaw in the US-Israel war plan, click to listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern.    

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by Editor - Thursday, June 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The plan to attack Iran, force regime change in Teheran, decapitate and disarm Iranian forces, and partition the country into ethnic autonomies is nothing new.  

In August 1941 British and empire forces (Indian, Australian) acted in coordination with Soviet forces to occupy the country, ostensibly to prevent the Shah of Iran from allowing German forces to seize Iranian oilfields and attack the land corridor from the Persian Gulf northwards across the country and into the Soviet Union through which US Lend-Lease aid for the war effort was being transported. At the time, with British air superiority in the south and Soviet air superiority in the north, the regime in Teheran had no choice but to capitulate.

By November 1943, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met together in Teheran (lead image, left), Stalin already knew the British were aiming to monopolize Iranian oil supplies for themselves, and with the Americans were “creat[ing] a real threat to the interests of our country if we do not take timely countermeasures.”  – Page 71. Stalin’s reaction was first to test Iran’s parliamentary leadership for signing an oil concession agreement. When the Iranians rejected that, Stalin ordered a Red Army-backed secession movement for an independent Azeri statelet based in Tabriz. He abandoned this scheme at the end of March 1946.

A recent anti-Soviet history of the episode claims Stalin retreated because he was afraid of direct conflict with the US, which was then planning atom bomb attacks on the Soviet Union. Also, Stalin “underestimated his Iranian opponents who ultimately left him out in the cold”.

Between 1982 and 1988 the collective Soviet leadership faced a similar problem from the hostile regime in Teheran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; he called the Kremlin the “lesser Satan” after the “Great Satan” (US) and “Little Satan” (Israel). Khomeini implemented his hyperbole by threatening the Soviet Islamic republics, as well as the Red Army in Afghanistan. The Politburo retaliated by arming Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein sufficiently well to preserve his regime from being toppled by Khomeini’s counter-invasion; this followed after the failure of  Soviet efforts to dissuade Hussein from starting his war against Iran, and then to maintain  neutrality between the two sides.    

This week the evidence is mounting of a US plan to attack Iran, using Israeli forces in the air and on the ground, plus German, British, and other NATO logistic assets. The public cause of war has been repeated by President Donald Trump (lead image, right centre) – to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment, weaponization, and ballistic missile capabilities. “Look, Iran should have signed sign the deal,” Trump said on Monday at the G7 summit conference in Canada. ”Something’s going to happen…[Question: President, do you want to see regime change in Iran?] I want to see no nuclear weapon in Iran and we’re well on our way to making sure that happens….”  

Operationally, however, repeated missions by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) since last Friday (June 13) have failed to do this.  US and Russian sources have been reporting that only US B-2 and B-52 bombers, currently based in Qatar  and Diego Garcia  and armed with GBU-57A/B MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator)  bombs can achieve this result.  

Such an operation, in combination with other IAF raids on Iranian defences,  missile stocks and firing platforms, requires intensive and coordinated US, Israeli and allied intelligence, plus a large fleet of aerial refuelling tankers based in Cyprus and other close-in staging points.

This operation, US and Russian sources believe, is the reason Trump abruptly cancelled his G7 meetings and returned to the White House Situation Room. “As soon as I leave here, we’re going to be doing something. But I have to leave here.”   

Censorship, deception operations, and propaganda screens make it difficult to judge how much time, weapons stocks, and effective air defences the Israeli and Iranian forces have on the fourth day of the war. In this US-produced video summary, the conclusion is that the IAF has failed to achieve air superiority over Iran, except for the west border regions; and that therefore the risk to a US bombing operation over central Iran continues to be much higher than has been revealed in public.   

The film also claims that if Iran can protract its drone and missile barrages for several more days,  accelerating the tempo and adding new types of weapons, it will exhaust Israel’s air defence missile stocks and its inventory of air and ground attack weapons. “It seems that Iran can sustain the missile salvos for a longer period than Israel can maintain operational and non-depleted missile defence systems…time appears to be on the Iranian side despite the constant strikes deep inside the country conducted by in-situ covert sabotage drones and missiles.”   Min 12:45

If this is accurate, Trump is under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (lead image, right) to hurry up; and Russian President Vladimir Putin (lead image, right) knows it.

“The United States still needs some time”, Boris Rozhin reports for the Russian military blog Colonel Cassad in Moscow, “to gather in the theatre all the required ships, tankers and bombers…And so there has been talk of ‘another chance’, ‘send Witkoff’, etc. But then Iran will again be offered to abandon its nuclear program and missiles which Iran cannot accept. At the same time, if it was only about nuclear weapons, Iran was always ready to refuse them in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. But this isn’t about nuclear weapons – it is the desire to change the regime in Teheran.”  — June 17, 06:41.

“If Israel could have handled Iran itself, the launch of this scenario would not be required. But it is required primarily for Israel, because it was not possible to crush Iran quickly. Iran began to recover from the strikes and reorganize under a long-term war, which is like death for Israel… There is every reason to believe that in a fairly short time Israel will face a shortage of high-precision weapons. The forecast – they will be able to maintain the pace of blows for several tens of days, but not more than a hundred. Further, everything will depend on the political will of the Iranian leadership and the degree of its control over the population. At the cost of supertension and disproportionately high losses, Iran can still win. But it will be very difficult.”   — June 17, 12:21.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 17th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There are no flies on President Vladimir Putin.

That’s an expression which originated in the fly-blown goldrush mines of Australia in 1840 and then moved with the flies to the goldrush mines of California a few years later. Literally, it means a man who is too quick for a fly to settle on him. Metaphorically, it means a man who is much too clever to be fooled by a fraudster or deceived by an enemy.

Putin is much too quick not to recognize that President Donald Trump is both a fraudster and an enemy. Putin doesn’t have to be told by the General Staff that Trump’s war plans are an existential threat to Russia’s security on the western front (Ukraine, Romania, Poland); northern front (Norway, Sweden, Finland), eastern front (Japan, South Korea); and southern front (Iran).

Last Thursday night, as the US and Israel began their war against Russia’s strategic ally Iran, starting with decapitation strikes against the Islamic Republic’s leadership,  the Russian General Staff didn’t have to send Putin their “we told you so” message. But the Kremlin’s communication system broke down, nonetheless.

Officially, the war didn’t begin for the Russians until they detected US and Israeli fuelling, arming, and deception preparations on Thursday ahead of the first Israeli weapons launches after midnight into Friday. Earlier in the day, Putin had been telling his arms chiefs “we know the enemy’s modus operandi. However, I do not think we are falling behind in any way.”  The combination of drone and missile attack tactics of the enemy requires, he said, “the new state armament programme [to] ensure creation of a universal air defence system capable of operating under any conditions and effectively hitting air assault weapons regardless of their type.”  

What about defence against ultra close range, ultra low-altitude drone attacks of the kind which the US, the UK and Ukraine had successfully executed, evading detection  and interception, on June 1 against Russia’s nuclear bomber bases across the country? Putin’s scripted phrase  “air assault weapons” left that unmentioned in the Kremlin communiqué, but not in the closed-door session after Putin announced: “Let’s get to work”.*

What then was the similar coordination by the US and Israel of long-range air assault operations with ground-level attacks targeted fatally on five, possibly eight Iranian generals and five  Iranian nuclear scientists.  The US and Israeli media reports have termed these decapitation strikes acts of war, not acts of terrorism. The Russian media reports have followed suit.

The state media platform RIA Novosti editorialized on June 14 that the Israeli operations are a rehearsal for what the US and its allies are planning to do to Russia, and that this is well understood in Moscow. “Many respected analysts of different calibres believe that the purpose of the attack on Iran is to eliminate the country’s nuclear program (necessarily) and regime change (extremely desirable). In fact, the main goal of the operation is to work out a mass preventive disarming strike against the enemy with serious military capabilities – that enemy is called not Iran, but Russia.”  

This strategic plan, writes Boris Rozhin, a leading military blogger reflecting the views of senior Russian military officers, is President Donald Trump’s first of all,  and aimed at Russia next. “Current events in the Middle East region demonstrate a dramatic change in the geopolitical situation. The Western powers, throwing away their purported enmity, have united in a general offensive against an independent Iran, a key ally of Russia…The previous ‘disagreements’ have turned out to be only a spectacle for the public. Iran’s defeat will be a strategic catastrophe for Russia, surpassing even the loss of Syria. Iran plays a key role in maintaining a balance of power in the Middle East and is Russia’s most important ally in confronting Western domination…The war against Iran, initiated by the Western world, could have disastrous consequences for the entire world order. This is not a local conflict, but an attempt to finally break the last pockets of resistance to the unipolar world…For Russia, this means the need to make drastic decisions to protect its strategic interests and allies.”   — June 14, 21:19

“In summing up this story,” Rozhin wrote yesterday,   — June 14, 14:31,   “we can conclude – if there is anyone who has not yet understood – that the ‘Trump peace attempts’ are worthless and will lead to nothing – neither in the Middle East nor in Ukraine. Therefore, agreements with Trump are not worth it. It is necessary to strengthen the army and the military-industrial complex and achieve the goals of the SVO [Special Military Operation] by military means. In order not to say again, ‘we wanted peace, and the Americans deceived us again’, as the Iranians do now.”

In the policy discussion currently under way, a Moscow source reports the intelligence assessment that Iran’s military capabilities are not as effective as they have been publicly portrayed or as the generals have threatened; that the clerical leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knows this; and that he and his clerical allies believe their  best chance of survival in power is to limit the counterattack on Israel, ask for a ceasefire, bargain with their threat to close the Hormuz Strait, and abandon their negotiating positions on nuclear enrichment and missile development.

“If the nuclear bomb was a bluff, and we believe it was,” the source says, “then they should have learned the lessons of Saddam [Hussein]. They should have expected Netanyahu and Trump to call their bluff. Now that’s happened, Iran’s internal weakness is also stark. I believe SVR [foreign intelligence], GRU [military intelligence] and MiD [foreign ministry] have concluded  the conflict is the Iranians to lose – and this is what is happening. What can Putin do if the clerics have no nerve to fight?”

Follow the sequence of events as these messages went to the Kremlin for decision.  

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by Editor - Sunday, June 15th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Oreshnik Moment was first coined on June 1 here  and then discussed in the Reason2Resist podcast on June 3.  It’s a period of time – it’s not a prediction of the counter-attack which the Russian General Staff will launch against the June 1 drone attack on the bomber element of the triad of Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces.

The certainty of the counter-attack is given by the December 2024 nuclear deterrence doctrine, enacted  by President Vladimir Putin,   in order to preserve escalation control in the current war on the Ukrainian battlefield,  and to deter escalation by the US and NATO adversaries on Russia’s southern, western, northern and eastern fronts. Putin described the revisions of the doctrine in 2024 as “factor[ing] in the emergence of new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies”, particularly in “regard [to] an aggression against Russia from any non-nuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation.”  That’s the Ukraine now; it’s also Romania, Poland, Finland and Germany as the US places (and plans to deploy) nuclear weapons in these states, aimed at Russian targets.

“Our nuclear triad remains the most important security guarantee for our state and citizens, an instrument for maintaining strategic parity and balance of forces in the world, ” Putin had said last year. Ten days after the June 1 triad attack, Putin has now repeated his announcement.  “Special attention must be paid to the nuclear triad,”, he said on June 11,   “which has been and remains the guarantor of Russia’s sovereignty, playing a key role in maintaining the global balance of power.”

US analysts have been downplaying the seriousness of this strategic moment; they claim the moment is already passing for a strategic counter-attack, the launch of Oreshnik missiles at the Ukrainian, American and British command centres which directed the June 1 operation.

Russian sources emphasize they are in no hurry to act – focus instead, they warn, on the moment, not on the means.

Currently, the sources point out that there are two levels of direct Russia-US negotiations which were agreed during the telephone call between Putin and Trump on February 12.  At the first level, the talks to achieve an end-of-war settlement for the Ukraine battlefield have reached highly precise term sheets – 22 terms for the Ukraine,  33 terms for Russia.  The next session of the talks is anticipated in Istanbul at the end of June.

The second level of talks is between the Russian Foreign Ministry and US State Department on improving the diplomatic channels between the governments. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov described these as talks on the “irritants”. “As a third round of bilateral talks on irritants approaches, it is too early to disclose the date, but, hopefully, the [next] round will be held very soon,” the senior Russian diplomat told reporters.[The talks will raise] an entire range of issues, more or less complicated, even as there are basically no less complicated issues when it comes to the United States.”  Russia’s new ambassador to the US, Alexander Darchiev, said there have been few concrete agreements so far after two rounds on the “irritants”.  One of the gains, he said, was to hold the talks in the capitals, Moscow and Washington. No date for the next round, to be held in Moscow, has been fixed.

The “irritants” on the agenda of these negotiations include the US seizure of Russian consular property in Seattle, problems of access to the Russian dacha in Virginia, visa problems for UN meetings, the embassy staffing problems, access to bank accounts, and resumption of direct flights.

Ryabkov and Darchiev call these “irritants” with irony. They mean to make public their concern that after two sessions – February 27  and April 10   — there has been little agreement from the US side after the two sides have exchanged their Notes.  

Moscow sources say they believe the head of the US negotiating team, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Sonata Coulter, has been ordered to keep talking but agree to nothing.  One reason for this, the Russian side believes, is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House office in charge of personnel appointments have been slow to vet and approve appointments to the senior State Department bureaux. Rubio, for example, has yet to confirm his former assistant, Brendan Hanrahan, to become Coulter’s superior and head of the EUR bureau at State.

The decision to extend the Oreshnik moment does not reflect trust in Trump or his officials to agree on the Russian terms in these negotiations. It reflects patience, and the Kremlin’s calculation that there is nothing to lose in giving Trump more time to prove himself. Click for the discussion with Dimitri Lascaris explaining the reasons, and also the limits to this patience.  

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by Editor - Saturday, June 14th, 2025
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