By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Next year it will be four hundred years since the Amboyna Massacre of March 9, 1623. The British won’t be memorializing their countrymen’s killings by the Dutch, nor the Dutch celebrating one of the last gasps of their Asian empire. They are now allies in the fabrication of reasons for killing Russians.

Remember the Amboyna Massacre! That was fighting talk in London during a decade of litigation in The Netherlands, and leading to the first Anglo-Dutch War of 1652-54. The British won that one – and also the second war of 1655-57, and the third war of 1672-74.

In the Amboyna massacre the Dutch water-boarded and then executed a group of ten British merchants on the trumped-up charge of plotting to seize the Dutch fortress on the island of Ambon, now part of Indonesia,  where today  it is called Maluku. They were beheaded, along with nine Japanese mercenaries and a Portuguese they had employed. The head of the senior English officer, Gabriel Towerson, was put on a pike for display by the Dutch . On the fiftieth anniversary, John Dryden gave Towerson the leading role in a play he put on the London stage entitled, “Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, A Tragedy”. That was the time when British political propaganda was written by men of talent.

The real reason for the massacre was that the Dutch were trying to keep their monopoly of the nutmeg harvest on the island, making sure the British didn’t undercut their prices or their influence with the local sultans  who controlled the indigenous nutmeg plantations. In those days, nutmeg was more than the sweet spice it’s thought of today. It was a strategic commodity – and a matter of national security in Europe. That was because it was believed to be able to ward off the Black Plague.

Also, the British and Dutch were fighting for sea routes and colonial assets capable of producing much more than nutmeg. Along the way, the Dutch lost New Amsterdam (aka New York) and much more besides. The Amboyna massacre had another unintended outcome – having lost the heads of several of its best men, the British merchant holding, the East India Company, decided to exit Indonesia, and  entrench themselves in India instead. India was good for cotton textiles, chintzes, and the blue dye known as indigo. Nutmeg stayed with the Dutch, but the British stole the Ambon nutmeg  tree and replanted it in other parts of their empire.  

At the litigation stage, before the warring started, the British position was that the Dutch had no jurisdiction to put the Amboyna victims on trial for treason, let alone torture them and cut their heads off. That was judicial murder according to the British reading of the applicable Dutch and English laws and case precedents. The Dutch insisted that on their territory they had the jurisdiction to do what they did. By the time the litigation was over with acquittals of the Dutch judges who had issued the guilty verdicts and the death sentences, it didn’t matter. War did.

Fast forward to March 9, 2020. Dutch jurisdiction was decided by the US and the NATO allies for prosecuting the allegation against retired Russian army officer Oleg Pulatov  of murdering the 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by shooting the aircraft down in the Ukraine on July 17, 2014.  The trial which began two years and four months ago has hidden the identities and proceedings of the judges investigating the evidence behind the court room. The Dutch state prosecutors have accepted the trumped-up evidence of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). The promised smoking-gun evidence of US satellite photographs never materialized.  In anticipation, the guilty verdict has been as obvious as Towerson’s head on the Dutch pike.

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 6th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Philip Short, a journalist from the BBC, has published a new book which claims to be a biography of Vladimir Putin. It isn’t.

What it is instead is a biography of one hundred and twenty-three westerners — what they claim to know about Russia’s leader  and what for commercial motive, reason of state, or vanity they have told Short in interviews he conducted for his book. They include spies he names without their cover – John Scarlett, Richard Dearlove, Richard Bridge,  Kate Horner, Martin Nicholson, and Pablo Miller from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6); Hans-Georg Wieck and August Hanning of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND); Jean-Francois Clair, Raymond Nart,  and Yves Bonnet  of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST); Seppo Tiitinen of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service (SUPO); Mark Kelton, Michael Morell, Peter Clement, Michael Sulick, Michael Morgan, Paul Kolbe, and William Green of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Juri Pihl, head of the Estonian Internal Security Service, and Eerik-Niiles Kross, chief of Estonian intelligence; and several dozen other ambassadors, consuls, advisers, headquarters staff, journalists, and think-tankers.

Not one of the spies was operational in Moscow for the past twenty-one years of Putin’s terms in office.

There is a flash of originality in this book. Not a single source on which Catherine Belton’s book  on Putin relies has been interviewed by Short; in his references to Belton’s claims Short reports they “appear to be untrue”. He reaches the same conclusion about two other books about Putin, Karen Dawisha’s   and Masha Gessen’s.    “Neither book pretends to be a balanced account”, Short says.  Dawisha’s book “is marred by numerous errors of fact”. “All three”, Short warns, “set out the case for the prosecution, and like all prosecutors, the authors select their evidence accordingly.” 

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by Editor - Monday, July 4th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a right way and a wrong way to understand how the war against the West is being fought on the Russian home front.

The wrong way is to read the Anglo-American media, their stay-behind correspondents in Moscow, and their aggregators in Washington, DC.  

The right way is to take a Russian beer. I mean, take the Russian beer business as an illustration of how the fightback is being fought – and how effectively.

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by Editor - Thursday, June 30th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Poles have always had a serious problem with their neighbours.  

They have the Germans on their western flank, the Russians on their eastern flank, and inside their borders there used to be the Jews, but now there are the Ukrainians. In September 1939 there were about 3.3 million Polish Jews.    Since February 24 of this year, the Ukrainians in Poland have come to the same number.   

The war which the Polish government and military have been fighting against Russia is proving to be almost worthless politically to Law and Justice (PiS), the ruling party in Warsaw; and also to the Civic Platform (PO) and its allies, the principal opposition coalition (KO).  The PiS was 15 percentage points ahead of the KO in the voter polls a year ago, 35% to 20%; the margin between them now is 11 points, 38% to 27%.  The gains for each are close to the margin for statistical error.

Economically, the war is costing much more in public outlays for the refugees than the value of US and NATO arms flows and related war income. By the time Warsaw pays for its new US weapons, it will owe more than when the war started; and there is still no relief from the European Union funding freeze and penalties.   

What’s to be done, the Poles ask themselves – and who’s to blame when they realise the answer is something between not much and nothing.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 29th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When it comes to bulldogs fighting under a rug Winston Churchill thought they were Russians. Little did he know about Canadians in Ottawa.

The chief dogs in this fight are Trevor Cadieu and Chrystia Freeland (lead image, right).  Cadieu is a lieutenant general who specialises in planning armoured operations against the Russian army in Europe; Freeland is the deputy prime minister, scion of Galicia in western Ukraine,  and candidate prime minister to replace Justin Trudeau, if she can.

As the Canadian politician most directly connected to the Ukraine by family and property, and the most active advocate of war against Russia, Freeland has promoted Canadian military strategy and plans to wage that war on Ukrainian territory and across the Ukrainian borders for many years.   

In Ottawa also, Cadieu has been director of war plans since mid-2019.  No public record is known of his visits to the Ukraine in the following two years. His appointment as chief of Canada’s defence staff was announced in August 2021, then withdrawn in September following the start of an official investigation of sexual assault charges dating from his military cadet days. When the  investigation ended in an official indictment, Cadieu resigned. By April he was in the Ukraine again, working directly on coordinating the new supplies of tanks, armoured vehicles, howitzers,  and other artillery from NATO member states to the Ukraine.

Speaking through an Ottawa defence reporter named David Pugliese, Cadieu declared his innocence of the criminal charges and promised to return from the Ukraine to answer them. He then disappeared as the Russian forces intensified their targeting of Ukrainian and NATO general staff as they prepared operations to save Odessa in the southeast, and Lvov in the west.   

On Friday Pugliese reported Cadieu had surrendered to Canadian police and been released to appear in a local court in August. In the meantime Pugliese has reported an active online debate between supporters and critics of the sexual misconduct charges; these include a comment in support of Cadieu from retired Brigadier-General James Cox claiming the charges against him amount to “sedition to undermine national leadership;”  by that he meant mutiny by the politicians against the generals.

As deputy prime minister with supervision over most government ministers and war plans for the Ukraine, Freeland has claimed to have known nothing of the sexual misconduct which was identified a year ago against General Jonathan Vance, chief of the defence staff between 2015 and 2021. At the time Freeland declared: “No woman serving Canada should be sexually harassed while doing that, and I’m happy right now today to apologize to any woman who was sexually harassed while serving her country;”   by that she meant to condemn no one by name of anything.

Freeland is missing from the list of high officials contacted by former judge Louise Arbour  for her investigation of sexual violence in the Canadian military which began in May 2021 and concluded with the release of her 420-page report last month.    Arbour is known in Europe as the NATO prosecutor of Yugoslav and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Arbour concluded her report on the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF): “Members of Indigenous and black communities, and other visible minorities and equity-seeking groups, have been largely absent, clearly not welcome. For years, women were simply shut out. When finally allowed to serve, women were made to feel they did not belong. They were denied opportunities to compete fairly and to thrive. They were harassed, humiliated, abused and assaulted, and, appallingly, many continue to be targeted today… One of the dangers of the model under which the CAF continues to operate is the high likelihood that some of its members are more at risk of harm, on a day to day basis, from their comrades than from the enemy.” By enemy, Arbour  meant what Cadieu and Freeland mean.  

There has been no disclosure, no indictment, no apology for the Canadian military role in the Ukraine, training and arming Ukrainians committed to reviving Nazi doctrine from World War II.  Nor for the war crimes now alleged by eastern Ukrainians  to have been committed by western Ukrainians during the civil war which began in 2014. According to Arbour, “the very success of CAF operations, which I am not in a position to assess, reinforces its view that it is unique, and that CAF can do everything without the assistance of outsiders, as it always has.” By not to assess, Arbour meant not to doubt nor criticize.  

A Canadian with NATO warfighting experience comments: “The contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau’s ‘communism’. They believe the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“The truth, that no one, including Pugliese and other reporters will admit, is that the Canadian military, not to mention large swathes of law enforcement, is not reliable in terms of defending the Canadian state if the ruling faction pursues policies contrary to the officers’ wishes.”

There is no mutiny, at least not against the war against Russia, responds a veteran Canadian politician. “I have seen no indication that senior officers in the Canadian military oppose Canada’s hyper-aggressive approach to the Ukraine war. My impression from day one has been that Canada’s military is as belligerent toward Russia as any in NATO.”

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by Editor - Sunday, June 26th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The action the Lithuanian government implemented over the weekend to stop Russian trains carrying sanctioned cargos into Kaliningrad is regarded in Moscow as a long anticipated move, prompted among Lithuanian officials by the British government. The initial Lithuanian embargo action has been followed by a second one this week extending the blockade to trucks and road transport.   Neither action has been publicly announced by the Lithuanian government.

The first news came from Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad, following a  notice sent to him by Lithuanian officials. That notice has not been published.

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda (lead image) has said nothing.  

Lithuanian Prime Minister  Ingrida Simonyte announced through the British Broadcasting Corporation that the blockade was not a blockade because only some cargoes were halted, and because “Lithuania is complying with the sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russia for its aggression and war against Ukraine ” . She also told the British state radio “it was important not to overreact”.  

She tweeted: “Any talk of a blockade of Kaliningrad is a lie. Lithuania is complying with the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia for its aggression and war against Ukraine.  The sanctions were agreed by all the EU member states on March 15…. Passenger transit is also taking place, under a special agreement by the EU, RU, & LT. Steel and ferrous metal products account for only around 1% of the total rail freight to Kaliningrad via LT.”  

In the three days which have followed the Lithuanian action, the US and British Governments, the European Union (EU),  and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have not supported the Lithuanian blockade.

The Russian Security Council met on Wednesday morning, but issued no statement on Lithuania.  The Secretary of the Council, Nikolai Patrushev, who was in Kaliningrad on Tuesday, had announced there that the “consequences will have a serious negative impact on the population of Lithuania.”

Yesterday, at the same time as President Vladimir Putin was chairing the Security Council meeting, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced it is delaying “concrete measures” in reaction:  “The measures will not be diplomatic, but practical, they are now being worked out in an interdepartmental format, We are not talking about this not because we are hiding something, but because the process of their coordination and elaboration is underway. I would like to emphasize once again (the third time for today’s briefing): we have told the European Union and Lithuania about the need to change the steps they have taken. Perhaps something from that side will be changed, and, accordingly, our reaction will be different.”

Here is a compilation of the official documents.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the rest of the world it is known as the cultural cringe. In Russia the wish to be loved by Americans is known as liberal reform.

In the very first paragraph of a new book called “Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union”, the author, Vladislav Zubok – the name in Russian means a small tooth — reveals that on the morning of August 19, 1991, when the first coup was attempted against Mikhail Gorbachev, then President of the Soviet Union, Zubok was flying to the US by arrangement with Strobe Talbott,   Moscow correspondent for Time and soon to be the Clinton Administration’s principal Russia expert. At the time Zubok describes himself as a “Moscow-based academic intellectual”. By this, he means he was no simple worker with a Moscow university degree. In Soviet class terms, he insists the reader recognise him to be an “intellectual”. That then was upper class, and Zubok wants the reader to know the difference between the Russian upper and lower classes —  immediately, on the nineteenth line of his very first page.

Zubok also wants the reader to know he had been hired with money from “the prestigious Amherst College in Massachusetts”. What exactly was prestigious about Amherst, or Massachusetts for that matter — and to whom? And why does Zubok think that in a history of Russian politics between 1983 and 1991, such a remote place, with such an adjectival tag, was worth the mention?

The answer, like the other revelations of the first paragraph, reveals what this book turns out to be. It’s an exercise in American-style reconstruction of what a small group of Russians for hire were keen to give their masters, about the circumstances of the years leading up to Boris Yeltsin’s replacement of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Russia of the Soviet Union. But this isn’t Russian history. It’s the history of Russians with cultural cringe – the desire to be loved by Americans, and to tell them what they wanted, paid for, insisted on hearing then, and demand  now.  

The payoff, reported on the dust jacket of the book, comes from Talbott, Zubok’s original employer. He is quoted as saying: “This is a deeply researched indictment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s timidity and mercurial policies which backfired.” “Instead,” Talbott adds, “Russia at the turn of the 21^st century was ripe for the rise of Putin.” Zubok was ripe for what Talbott meant. “In 2008,” according to Zubok’s history, Putin “used military force against Georgia, and in 2014 he annexed Crimea and waged an undeclared war on Ukraine in Donbass.”  The blame for that, Zubok means, was Gorbachev’s mistakes. Without them, “had the Kremlin ruler made different choices… the Soviet Union could have gradually made its way into the world economy by a process of trial and error, with a nomenklatura-style state capitalism, and certainly with its institutions of power preserved.”

As for the Russian cultural cringe, Zubok is sure it was one of Gorbachev’s biggest mistakes.  During his well-known trips abroad in the 1980s, Gorbachev took with him, Zubok records, “a “huge entourage…of journalists, social scientists, writers, theatre directors, filmmakers and other cultural figures. Most of them shared [Gorbachev’s] fascination, admiration, and envy for things Western.”

Zubok has written a book to prove he doesn’t suffer this cringe. The work proves the opposite. This is the problem with cringers. They are too bent out of shape to recognize the shape they are in.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 21st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On March 15 the British Government announced it is imposing a ban on exports to Russia of “high-end luxury goods”.

According to the official press release, “the measures will cause maximum harm to Putin’s war machine while minimising the impact on UK businesses as G7 leaders unite to unleash a fresh wave of economic sanctions on Moscow. The export ban will come into force shortly and will make sure oligarchs and other members of the elite, who have grown rich under President Putin’s reign and support his illegal invasion, are deprived of access to luxury goods.”

Exactly what counts as “luxury goods” was loosely defined in the government’s statement as “luxury vehicles, high-end fashion and works of art” and “antiques”.

But the regulation issued to enforce the policy is much more comprehensive.  Section 11 of this regulation identifies “pearls, precious and semi-precious stones, articles of pearls, jewellery, gold or silversmith articles”. Section 21 covers “Works of art, collectors’ pieces and antiques”; that’s  the kybosh for oligarch luxury —  the Russia warfighters in London say they believe — to “cause maximum harm to Putin’s war machine”.

The official regulation defines this to cover goods higher in price than £250 (before VAT). They have been listed to include horses, caviar, wrist watches, xylophones, vacuum cleaners, ski boots, saddles, perfumes, and pottery. Russian women buying lingerie, Russian men buying pyjamas, Russian children buying rollerskates, and Russian housekeepers buying toasters have all been hit with “maximum harm”. Russian spies have been banned from buying British-made false beards and wigs.

Compression stockings for varicose veins will be stripped off Russian legs at the airport, and confiscated under the new rule.  Bathing suits, however, if worn instead of underwear, are exempted from the ban.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 15th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On June 13, for the first time since the Russian military operation began in the Ukraine, a detailed Russian intelligence assessment has been published in Moscow of Polish strategy for the future of Ukraine. This follows several weeks of brief statements by Russian security and intelligence officials claiming the government in Warsaw is aiming at an anschluss or  union  with the “eastern borderlands” known in Poland as Kresy Wschodnie, and in the Ukraine as Halychyna; that’s to say, Galicia.  

These Russian claims have been dismissed as propaganda by the Poles.  Polish strategy, according to Warsaw sources, is to preserve the Zelensky regime in Kiev and the unified Ukrainian military command — and not to acknowledge the possibility of their defeat by the Russian army east of the Dnieper River.

In this week’s discussion between Vlad Shlepchenko, a military analyst for Tsargrad in Moscow, and Vladimir Kozin, a leading academic attached to the Russian intelligence think tank, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, they consider the scope of the strategic problem which they think the Poles, and behind them the US and NATO, will continue to pose, after the objectives of Phase-1 and Phase-2 of the Russian military operation in the Ukraine have been completed.  

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by Editor - Monday, June 13th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Cossacks are known for many things, but not for being Roman Catholics like the Galicians of western Ukraine around Lvov, or like the Poles around Cracow.

Originally, the Cossacks swore off eating horsemeat, veal, hare, and pork. Pork is the principal meat of Lvivska (lead image, right) and Krakowska (left), the traditional sausages of Lvov and Cracow. They differ from one another in the spicing – Lvov with onion, marjoram, coriander and bay leaves; Cracow with nutmeg and sugar. In ingredients, the original Cossack sausages were closer to the Jewish ones.

In the war which is now extending from Europe to the world, taste in sausage shouldn’t be confused with race hatred. On May 22, when Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland, declaimed in front of President Vladimir Zelensky at the Verkhovna Rada in Kiev, that “you are – as your national anthem has it – of Cossack stock! You are magnificent!” Duda was making a racial observation with a profound mistake – and not only about sausages.  

The Cossacks of the Ukraine came from the lands between the Dnieper and the Don Rivers – that’s between 700 and 1,400 kilometres from Galicia and a journey of nine to twenty hours by motor, days by horse.  The Cossacks were Slavs and they were Orthodox Christians. By their ethnic origin, language, culture, and religion, they had little in common with the people who lived to the west of the Dnieper; that’s between Kiev, Lvov and the Polish border today. The Cossacks didn’t start eating pork sausage until after they gave up the nomadic life, got off their horses, and settled to farming.

When Duda told the Kiev deputies “I trust the goodness, the friendships made between millions of Poles and Ukrainians will mean we will be good neighbours forever now. This is a great historic opportunity and the great historic break–through”, he was getting closer to the truth of the history. But that is the history of  several hundred years of wars and race hatred between the Galicians and the Poles, and between the Galicians and Poles together against the Russian Slavs. It’s also a story Duda, his political party, and the Polish opposition backed by Mark Brzezinski, the US Ambassador in Warsaw,  recognize as a cause of war inside Poland, as well as outside.

The “historic break-through” which Duda declared in Kiev is only 81 years old, from the time of Duda’s grandfather.*  That was in 1941, when the German Wehrmacht incorporated Galicia into the General Government of southern Poland (Generalne Gubernatorstwo in Polish). Four years later, as the Germans retreated westwards to Berlin, it became the covert strategy of the US Army and then the policy of successive US governments for the extension eastwards of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) alliance; since 1945 that policy has also included regime change in Moscow, and the breakup, first of the Soviet Union, and then of the Russian Federation. That was also the announced strategy of Ambassador Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor of the Carter Administration between 1977 and 1981.   

Duda’s speech of May 22 was a Polish call to the Galicians to put aside the race hatred between themselves, and revive the race hatred which the two Catholic peoples, plus the Germans, have shown towards the Russians – also the Jews from whom the Zelensky family comes.

“How can I speak now,” Duda began his address, “when I am almost overcome with emotion”. Duda’s emotion was also calculated for the Polish audience who will vote in the next national election in just twelve months’ time.

Duda’s call to race war against the Russians was also an attempt to secure Poland against its more recent enemy Germany, and neutralize the US government’s attempt to topple the government in Warsaw. For Duda to manage this combination and hold on to power requires the appearance of a much closer Polish alliance with the Kiev regime than the Ukrainian military commanders and the Galician nationalists are contemplating at the moment, as they are forced into retreat westwards, like the Wehrmacht.  Their taste in sausage isn’t Duda’s, or Brzezinski’s, President Zelensky’s or the Cossacks for that matter.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 12th, 2022
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