by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump has pulled a fast one against the US Constitution, if not quite and  not yet a coup d’état.

“We have an idea of coups being external military assaults on the government,” a US constitutional law professor has reported. “But self-coups take place within the government, from within the executive branch in particular.”

Without the force required for a putsch – not yet, because the Insurrection Act is in Trump’s reserve powers and may be invoked  —  the officials advising Trump’s actions claim Article II of the Constitution    provides him with  “unitary” executive power to freeze or impound funds legislated by the Congress, dismiss state employees, and order the armed services into action.    Since February, the President’s lawyers have prepared for the Supreme Court majority Trump appointed in his first term — and will add to if he can soon —  to rule that “as this Court observed just last Term, Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority”—including the President’s ‘unrestricted power of removal’ with respect to ‘executive officers of the United States whom [the President] has appointed.’ ”  

Last week, in a telephone interview with the Atlantic Monthly, Trump announced: “I run the country and the world”.    In a follow-up face-to-face interview with the magazine on April 24,  Trump told the Kiev regime and its European allies that he was ready to support them but not necessarily to accept that Vladimir Zelensky will continue in office.

He was also telling President Vladimir Putin to accept his terms for ending the war in the Ukraine, and not to tarry at testing his powers to escalate his military support on the Ukrainian battlefield and to add sanctions to stop Russian energy trade between China and India. .

Putin’s reply, announced on Monday (April 28), is a test of Trump’s powers. Declaring a new three-day ceasefire  between May  8 and  11,  Putin said that “in the event of any violations of the ceasefire by the Ukrainian side, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will give a proportionate and efficient response. The Russian side reiterates its willingness to enter peace talks without preconditions, with a view to eliminating the root causes behind the Ukraine crisis and establishing constructive interaction with international partners.”  

In the first sentence,  Putin told Trump to prove he can order the Zelensky regime to obey the ceasefire. If he can’t  —  if there are Ukrainian violations as there have been during the  March 18-April 18 energy infrastructure ceasefire and the April 19-20 Easter ceasefire — Putin is saying that Trump’s term sheet, delivered last Friday by Steven Witkoff,  is worthless.

In his second sentence, Putin told Trump to address the “root causes” with the NATO allies  and other “international partners” by halting the NATO advance eastwards on all fronts, not only in the Ukraine;  and by lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia and its partners since 2014. Without Trump’s demonstration that he controls the other powers, Putin is exposing Trump’s peace proposals as the continuation of war by other means.

Putin’s language was also directed domestically to those of his advisors who have recommended  he accept what they concede to be Trump’s “bad deal”.  

In the Kremlin debate, their reasons are that Russian military forces are unprepared for the offensive to achieve the Kiev regime’s capitulation; that the splitting between the US and the European powers has never been so favourable to Russian interests; that the Russian oligarchs want a return to business as usual; and because the intelligence assessment of Trump is so unstable,  there is no telling what war plans Washington will follow in the sequence they have been signalling.  

Retired Army General Keith Kellogg, who has retained his presidential appointment because he reflects powerful elements inside Trump’s circle, has dismissed Putin’s response.

“A three-day ceasefire is absurd,” Kellong told the  White House outlet Fox News on Tuesday (April 29).  “What the president wants is a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire — sea, air, land, infrastructure — for a minimum of 30 days, and then we can extend that.” Referring to what he said is Ukrainian agreement to a 22-point term sheet negotiated with the Europeans last week, Kellogg added: “When it comes to the Ukrainians, I’m very comfortable with where we are at right now…Russia is not winning this war. Russia has not made major advances in the last year and a half. They have not taken the city of Kiev, the capital. They haven’t pushed to the west of the Dnieper River, which is a major obstacle. They haven’t taken Odessa… They haven’t really moved anything. They’ve moved by metres, not by miles…President Trump has it exactly right, and where he wants to get to…The president has this one right on the money, and that’s where we want to go to.”

Before the podcast discussion later today with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern,  follow the seven  charts. Take note of the last one – this shows that despite growing disapproval by US voters of the President’s performance in office,  most Americans think Trump’s policy towards Russia is “too friendly”. This sentiment is holding strong at all education levels, for blacks and Hispanics, and across all age groups, except for the middle-aged (50-64). The most anti-Russian Americans recorded in this new poll appear to be Harris voters and black protestants.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is not the comedy of the two Odessa conmen who travel across the Soviet Union trying to find a cache of jewellery hidden in twelve chairs, written in 1928. In the end, one murders the other, and then when he discovers the treasure has already been found and spent, he goes mad.  

This is President Donald Trump’s comedy of the three chairs which were reduced to two so that, in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Trump could sit on one and Vladimir Zelensky on the other. Trump’s plan, however, was that no one should laugh at his con.  Murder and madness may still materialize.  

Yesterday,  Secretary of State Marco Rubio was sent to explain that at the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump wanted the cameras to record him as the peacemaker of the world. “We want the war to end,” Rubio told a Sunday television show. “You saw yesterday at the Pope’s mass there was talk about war and how it needed to stop.  The Pope – the late Pope was celebrated for being a peacemaker and trying to talk about these things.  We should all be happy that we have a president of the United States in Donald J. Trump who wants to end and prevent wars, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The comedy of four men – Trump, Zelensky, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — competing for just two chairs in front of dozens of cameras for millions of viewers  says otherwise. It reveals that between end-of-war on Russia’s terms and peace on their terms, they don’t know what President Vladimir Putin will agree to.

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by Editor - Sunday, April 27th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a good reason that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and it has nothing to do with heredity, dendrology, or gravity. The reason is that trees understand the further away the apple is dropped, the easier it is to steal.

This is understood by the oligarchs who compose influential factions around President Donald Trump in Washington and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In the end-of-war negotiations Trump has tweeted to be “close to a deal” on April 23,   again on April 25,  then “very close to a deal” on April 26,  the oligarch representative and deal negotiator for the US side is Steven Witkoff; his counterpart on the Russian side is Kirill Dmitriev.

It cannot be Trump’s ambition to emulate predecessor George Washington’s truth-telling in the story of his hatchet and the apple (cherry) tree.   This is because from his boyhood Trump was encouraged by his father to lie in order to get the better of his brothers and sisters for their father’s favour.  

Instead, it is Trump’s ambition — also his innovation in presidential politics — to adapt the century-old US empire’s war for hegemony in Europe against Russia by compelling both his allies in the war (Germany first of all, then France, Poland, UK), and his war targets (Russia and the Ukraine), to pay him for protection against the enemy he claims to be making peace with.  A short-term armistice or truce on the Ukraine border, accompanied by a long-term war plan that preserves the US protectorate in Europe, at the Europeans’ expense, serves the president’s personal ambition, and also the strategy which has been written for him by his advisors.   

“A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine,” Trump tweeted a few hours after Witkoff had left the Kremlin on Friday afternoon.  “They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’ Most of the major points are agreed to. Stop the bloodshed, NOW. We will be wherever is necessary to help facilitate the END to this cruel and senseless war!”

This was false, as the texts of the US end-of-war terms and of the Anglo-French and German term sheet, released by Reuters on April 25, reveal.

A text of the Ukrainian term sheet,  published by the New York Times later the same day, adds provisions which “could be nonstarters for the Kremlin”, the newspaper reports: “there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, ‘a European security contingent’ backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war…Ukraine’s accession to NATO depends on consensus among the Alliance’s members….Territorial issues could be discussed after the full and unconditional cease-fire.”  

Term sheets are bids, they are not deals. In making the former appear to be the latter, Trump’s appeal is to those who believe they can all shake Trump’s war-making money tree and make money for themselves in the short run. This is standard dendrology – trees usually fruit only once in a season.

The Dmitriev faction in Russia, says a Moscow source, believes Putin should give Trump a  short-term armistice of forces in place in the Ukraine in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against Russian reserves, current trade and investment, and resumption of the export of oligarch capital which Putin and his former Finance Minister and candidate prime minister Alexei Kudrin,  and Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina have directed since Putin’s term began. “It’s a perfect three year pause in fighting,” the source commented following Witkoff’s meeting at the Kremlin on Friday with Putin, Dmitriev and Yury Ushakov, Putin’s assistant. “Come 2028, if  Trump loses, the  war will start all over again, but the Russians will get it right. For now it’s very obvious Trump has no one he trusts in CIA, State and Pentagon to implement his terms. So Putin will get the most he can and do the deal. He should.”

A second Russian source confirms: “I believe a bad deal is coming, but we are clear-eyed about this. There will be a ceasefire, but how long it lasts, who can tell.  This isn’t a sell-out. We have no illusions about the reliability of American agreements or Trump’s stability. Putin is telling the General Staff: we’ve got to sign something — prepare for war. He’s also got to convince Russians of this for the longer term. In this future, the pre-war oligarchs haven’t the power of the new military-industrial complex. They will profit by going along. They realize that if they don’t,  Putin’s successor is coming, and he won’t be as friendly to them.”

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by Editor - Saturday, April 26th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In Shelley’s most famous poem, the relics are described of Ozymandias, the ancient ruler with his “sneer of cold command” and his ill-fated power projection:  

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Wess Mitchell, whose grand strategy for Trump was announced this week in Foreign Affairs, the platform of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, places Trump among the rulers of ancient Sparta, then beside Metternich and Bismarck, in expanding his empire while avoiding  “delusions of grandeur”.  

Trump’s first target is the Kremlin, Mitchell has reported, not to make peace but to neutralize  Russia, while Trump swings his guns around to aim at China.

“Today, the weaker rival is Russia. This has become all too obvious as Ukraine has chewed through Moscow’s military resources. The United States should thus aim to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a détente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing. The goal should be not to remove the sources of conflict with Russia but to place constraints on its ability to harm U.S. interests. This process should begin by bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that is favorable to the United States.”

In this new podcast with Dimitri Lascaris, the two legs of the Ozymandias strategy are analyzed – the correlation of political and military forces in Europe and Asia, as Trump and his men calculate their strength;  and the money they are counting to earn themselves from the rearmament of Germany, Japan and other allies whom they plan to supply.

The miscalculation in this strategy is that it concedes that Russia is now stronger on the Ukrainian battlefield than the US and its forces; likewise, China is stronger now for a special military operation in Taiwan than the US and its allies aim to be in a few years’ time. The conclusion is plain – Russia’s security interests in Europe dictate accelerating its westward drive across the Ukraine, while China’s security interests are best served by moving against Taiwan sooner, not later.

As the podcast also reveals, so long as they can pocket billion-dollar riches now, which their placemen at the Pentagon, US Treasury and Department of Commerce are fixing, Trump and his men can afford to ignore the outcome for Ozymandias in the long term.

This is the  strategy of fighting one war at a time while making lots of money in the meantime. In tactics it relies on the operations of fraud ahead of the operations of force, and counts on the power of propaganda to convince the world that all Trmup wants is for the killing to stop.  

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by Editor - Friday, April 25th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In this new podcast the word that podcasters are afraid to say aloud, for fear of sounding “lunatic leftists” – Donald Trump’s phrase – is imperialism. Listen to the presentation with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern here and for the compelling evidence, read on.

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by Editor - Thursday, April 24th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Yevgeny Krutikov is a former Russian military intelligence officer in the Balkans who now writes politico-military and intelligence analyses for Vzglyad.  Because of the intention of his  sources and their target audience, Krutikov’s papers are more a bellwether of formed policy thinking than influencer of policy decisions yet to be made.

Krutikov is also an Afrikaans-speaking specialist on Africa, a bird fancier, and a pin-up devotee. His posts of birds and girls appear regularly in his Telegram channel Mudraya Ptitsa  (lead images).*

Krutikov has just published a report entitled “How will the reform of the State Department affect Russia’s interests”.   This is an analysis of a New York Times publication of the day before, reporting the leak of a “draft of a Trump administration executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department”. The US newspaper concluded: “It was not immediately clear who had compiled the document or what stage of internal debates over a restructuring of the State Department it reflected. It is one of several recent documents proposing changes to the department, and internal administration conversations take place daily on possible actions. Some of the ideas have been debated among U.S. officials in recent weeks, though it is unclear to what degree they would be adopted or how active the draft is, officials said.”  

In Krutikov’s analysis, there are two conclusions of fact expressed ideologically, the first leading to the second. In contrast to “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power”,  “the key moment for maintaining tension between the United States and Russia was precisely the imposition of ‘values’ artificially invented by America on the whole world. The withdrawal from the diplomatic practice of ‘promoting democracy’ and the liberal-leftist agenda is in itself a positive phenomenon…This environment consists almost entirely of liberals and leftists, and Trumpists are rare there. Consequently, there is simply no one to formulate new principles of foreign policy in a concentrated form.”

Neither of these answers directly the question of Russians interests which Krutikov posed in the title. They can be inferred in a third, implied conclusion: the “liberal agenda” and “leftist ideology” are anathema to Russian interests — because they are in retreat in Washington and absent in Moscow, and because “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power” is shared by the Russians, the end-of-war terms the Trump Administration is proposing do not threaten Russian interests.  

The Russian text has been translated verbatim without editing, illustration, reference, or clarification.

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the State Department’s readout of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s telephone call to NATO Secretary-General, Mark Rutte, Rubio said: “while our nation has been committed to helping end the war, if a clear path to peace does not emerge soon, the United States will step back from efforts to broker peace.”  That was last Friday, April 18.

Rubio was repeating what he had said in Paris two days before, following his talks on what he has called “specific outlines of what it might take to end the war”. In his brief press conference at Le Bourget Airport, Rubio repeated himself five times in as many minutes.  

 “We are now reaching a point where we need to decide and determine whether this is even possible or not, which is why we’re engaging both sides…So we came here yesterday to…try to figure out very soon – and I’m talking about a matter of days, not a matter of weeks – whether or not this is a war that can be ended.  If it can, we’re prepared to do whatever we can to facilitate that and make sure that it happens, that it ends in a durable and just way. If it’s not possible – if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen – then I think the President’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, well, we’re done.  We’ll do what we can on the margins.  We’ll be ready to help whenever you’re ready to have peace.  But we’re not going to continue with this endeavor for weeks and months on end.”

Again: “there’s no – no one’s saying this can be done in 12 hours.  But we want to see how far apart it is and whether those differences are – can even be narrowed, if it’s even possible to get movement within the period of time we have in mind.”

And again: “we need to figure out here now, within a matter of days, whether this is doable in the short term.  Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on, from our perspective.  The President feels very strongly about that.  He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this, and there are a lot of things going on in the world right now that we need to be focused on. So, this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserve just as much if not more attention.”

And yet again: “we need to figure out whether it’s even possible within the short term.  I can tell you this:  This war has no military solution to it.  It really doesn’t.  It’s not going to be decided with – neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly…If it’s not going to happen, then we’re just going to move on.  We’re going to move on to other topics that are equally if not more important in some ways to the United States.”

And for the fifth time: “now we’ve reached the point where we have other things we have to focus on.  We’re prepared to be engaged in this as long as it takes, but not indefinitely, not without progress.  If this is not possible, we’re going to need to move on… But if it’s not going to happen, we need to know now because we have other things we have to deal with.”  

Trump then repeated Rubio’s repeats. “If for some reason one of the parties makes it very difficult, we’re just gonna say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just gonna take a pass. Hopefully, we won’t have to do that…And Marco’s right in saying we’re getting – we want to see it end.”  

This is nothing if not orchestration.

The interpretation it prompts is that there is a US default position which Trump and his men have already discussed and to which they have decided they will revert. Alternatively, they haven’t agreed yet on what to do, and the repetitions of Rubio and Trump are a negotiating bluff to press for more concessions from Kiev, Moscow,  and the European capitals.

In fact, the default is both – a Trump bluff which Rubio has been told to repeat; and a plan for warfighting against both Russia and China, though not at the same intensity at the same time.

This default scheme was spelled out some time ago by Wess Mitchell, a senior State Department official in Trump’s first term and business partner of Elbridge Colby, now the Pentagon’s chief strategist.    Mitchell’s default,  to cite the headlines of two of his papers, is  “To prevent China grabbing Taiwan, stop Russia in Ukraine”   and “Strategic Sequencing, Revisited”  

That’s the objective. The means are to reorient the bulk of US forces to warfighting against China; avoid a two-front war with Russia and China simultaneously; and increase the capacities of the European states to continue the fight against Russia in Ukraine while retaining, even reinforcing the troop, missile, and nuclear weapon reserves of US firepower in Europe.  

“Sequencing is a strategy,” Mitchell declaimed last October,   “for gaining an early advantage in that competition—not a solvent for the underlying fact of competition. The whole point is to manage time wisely by using the proxy wars that are underway in Ukraine and Israel to increase our own capacity to wage war, so that a larger and more consequential war may yet be avoided due to our enhanced strength. If a sequencing strategy fails in its immediate aims but nevertheless delivers a significant plus-up in the West’s collective capabilities, it will still leave us better off than we would otherwise have been for fighting a future war in the Indo-Pacific when it comes.”   

The Trump default in the present “peace negotiations” with Russia is the Mitchell-Colby war against both Russia and China, but not simultaneously – it’s the military strategy of the 18^th century homily, the stitch in time to save nine.  

Practical evidence that this is what is happening at the moment is at the Polish border with the Ukraine, where the recent evidence reveals the US Army is withdrawing its military stores, men, missiles, and transport base at Rzeszow.

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by Editor - Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“The priority for peacemaking in Europe has to be Russia and the United States. It has long been US imperial policy since 1945 to break, block, and destroy the capability of the Russians, either in the form of the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, to form a level of partnership, cooperation, and economic and political power in Europe that threatens American hegemony in Europe.  So now, at the present moment, what is Trump’s default position on that – on US hegemony? In answer, Mr Trump is the best enemy Russia has ever fought against.”

“What’s Trump’s default position if he can’t get a peace plan? Arguably right now he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t have much time before the mid-term Congressional elections come on which he’ll have to fight, not against a clear Democratic Party presidential candidate, but locally against Republicans who will be held responsible for inflation and every other ailment that Trump’s tariff war will have caused at the local level.”

Listen to this discussion with leading Indian military strategist, Lieutenant-General Ravi Shankar, aired from Chennai on April 21.   

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by Editor - Monday, April 21st, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It’s Easter for Christians, and President Donald Trump’s message is a religious one.

He aims to be one of the angels of deliverance whom the gospels report to have showed themselves at the tomb of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. Rolling the stone from the entrance to the tomb, and in place of his corpse, the appearance of the angels confirmed the resurrection.  

 “Through the pain and sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross,” Trump has tweeted, “we saw God’s boundless Love and Devotion to all Humanity and, in that moment of His Resurrection, History was forever changed with the Promise of Everlasting Life.” He went on: “America is a Nation of Believers. We need God, we want God and, with His help, we will make our Nation Stronger, Safer, Greater, more Prosperous, and more United than ever before.”

Trump had announced his own personal divine deliverance last July, when he was grazed in an assassination attempt. “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”   He repeated his divine deliverance in his inaugural address of January 20: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”    In Congress on March 4, Trump  repeated  the divine mission. “I believe I was saved by God to make American great again. I believe that.”  

On Palm Sunday he added that he was “in prayer with Christians celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity.”  The White House log identified Trump’s only event of the day was to play golf from mid-morning until mid-afternoon.  

In this new podcast, Nima Alkhorshid leads the discussion of what Trump is expecting to be believed in the negotiations he is holding with Russia and with Iran; and of what he and his officials are actually doing. Click on the podcast here. 

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 16th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

At 10 on Monday morning this week, the official White House log shows that President Donald Trump was preparing himself to greet the President of Salvador who was arriving at the White House door in an hour’s time.  

But in a tweet Trump composed beforehand, he announced: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening… President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”  

Trump was falsifying what he had done himself to escalate the war against Russia from 2017 to 2021. He was also concealing the executive order he had signed four days before, on April 10 at 8:45 am. In that paper Trump agreed to the Biden Administration’s charge of “harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation—in particular, efforts to undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States.”  For that reason, Trump agreed to extend Biden’s executive order to continue economic warfighting against Russia, including the threat of new tariffs.  

Trump is now hiding what he has just agreed and signed. He has omitted to tweet a record of his agreement with Biden on the Russian enemy.  There is also no White House announcement on April 10 of Trump’s order to continue the economic guns firing in the war.  

“We did not have any high expectations here in this regard,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov responded, saying as little as possible to expose the Kremlin’s knowledge of Trump’s deceit.   

In fact, in Trump’s first term the president added two new laws intended to widen the scope and multiply the number of Russian targets for sanction targets; at the same time, Trump made it more difficult for a successor president to ease or lift his Russia sanctions.   Now that Trump is his own successor, he is continuing the Biden war which Obama and Trump had started.

Trump has refused to authorize his appointees at the State Department, Treasury, and National Security Council (NSC) to allow even limited easing of sanctions for the food and fertilizer trade that was under discussion last month in Saudi Arabia as part of the Black Sea “ceasefire” which Trump had discussed on the telephone with President Vladimir Putin.  

But there is just one form of sanctions relief which Trump has introduced – this is an indirect benefit to the Russian oligarchs who are already under sanctions designations. It’s not an offer to lift the individual sanctions; it’s a scheme for not prosecuting violations when the Russians find ways to evade the sanctions (or pay bribes in the intermediation). This Trump move is being concealed.

According to the Baker McKenzie law firm of Chicago, “Task Force KleptoCapture, one of the Biden era enforcement initiatives,  has been disbanded.  This was announced in a memo issued by US Attorney General Pam Bondi on February 5.  This was a task force within the US Department of Justice focused on enforcing the sanctions against Russian oligarchs.  This was the task force behind many of the high-profile asset seizures that were widely reported in the press, such as luxury yachts.”  

But the Russian oligarchs are impatient for direct, open sanctions relief from Trump. For this they are looking to Kirill Dmitriev to negotiate terms with Steven Witkoff; read more here.  

So far, however, the yachts and mansions concession is all that Trump and Witkoff have agreed to. Even the YachtBuyer in its report  on the superyacht market acknowledges that the asset brokers and oligarch intermediaries are cautious, warning that “any perceived softening on oligarch-linked assets could draw political and legal backlash from Ukraine’s allies, especially in Europe.”

How this is playing out in the courts on both sides of the war can be followed in the legal challenge Oleg Deripaska and his Rusal group of aluminium companies fought and lost late last year in Australia, and in the retaliation they have commenced in the Russian courts last week.

The complex legal argumentation and the Russia-hating government policy which motivates the continuing sanctions to stop worldwide movement of Russian minerals and metals,  and the multi-billion dollar retaliation which the Deripaska and the Kremlin are now threatening if the sanctions aren’t lifted,  are, as a Russian business source in Dubai puts it, “pushing the  accelerator and brake pedal at the same time for Trump, for Witkoff, their business associates, and the government agencies they are trying to run.”

In a new court move in Kaliningrad, revealed by a Moscow newspaper yesterday, Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium oligarch who has been under personal US sanctions since before 2014 – his Rusal companies since 2018 — has begun a retaliatory strike against the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto Corporation, the world’s second largest metals and mining corporation. Deripaska’s method is to retaliate for the sanctions cutting off the alumina supplies he owns in Australia by cutting off the mining company’s raw materials and railway access at its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, one of the largest and most profitable copper deposits in the world.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, April 15th, 2025
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