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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russian intelligentsia, their hangers-on, oligarchs, and Navalnyites have always suffered from a cultural cringe. The grass is greener on the other side of the Russian border, they think, and for obvious reasons – though they aren’t the same for each of the cringing elites.   So when the political tide […]

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By Stanislas Balcerac, Warsaw, and John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When Radosław Sikorski was a Polish government minister, he was obliged to make an annual report to the parliament (Sejm) and a public record of his income and assets. For Polish  voters to learn whether his wife was being rewarded for influencing her husband in his official […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When the German Army invaded Europe in the 1940s, they applied the doctrine of collective guilt against the civilian populations behind the Resistance and the partisans attacking their troops. After the Germans were defeated, the doctrine and the murderous result of it were judged to be a war crime. The London […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, the most famous English portraitist of the 18th century, have almost nothing to do with Russia at war today. Almost, but not quite nothing.

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By Marios Evriviades, Cyprus, translated from Greek by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with From time to time we read that Russia will recognize the separatist faits accomplis of Turkey’s occupation in Cyprus, in exchange for Turkey’s recognition of the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation. And each time the Russian government categorically refutes the existence of such […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Computer programmes used in universities to detect student plagiarism, along with semantic, style, and cognitive tests, reveal that Putin’s People, a book published by HarperCollins and bylined Catherine Belton, has another author or authors. Comparison testing of the vocabulary of Belton’s book and of transcripts of podcasts when Belton has been […]

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Translated and introduced by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In official testimony to the European Parliament last week, the European Union Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson, attacked Russia for “exacerbating the tight [supply] balance” and thus causing “the rising prices”. Responding to allegations against Gazprom, Simson promised an investigation. “We are looking into this claim, through our […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On the subject of Russia and the Russians, American exceptionalism pops up in the most unexpected places. Take the case of a new book from the Russia-warfighting publisher Random House of New York fetchingly sub-titled “In which four Russians give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life”. The Guardian, lead […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A stitch in time saves nine. That’s what police and prosecutors used to say when they were in hot pursuit of criminals. Hot pursuit used to mean no waiting.   However, the Metropolitan Police (lead image, left) took three years before announcing that Denis Sergeyev (alias Sergei Fedotov), a Russian military […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with German clinical evidence of Alexei Navalny’s chronic use of lithium and benzodiazepine drugs before his sensational collapse last year is being withheld and covered up by the Berlin doctors who obtained the evidence from testing a sample of Navalny’s hair. The significance of the hair testing was identified this month by […]