By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It is now one year and one month since there was a direct contact with Russia proving that either Sergei Skripal or Yulia Skripal, or both, are still alive. That was an hour-long telephone call from Yulia Skripal to her cousin Viktoria Skripal on November 21, 2020.   There has been […]

by Editor - Monday, December 20th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with How to stop the US provocations aimed at pushing Russia to go to war in the Ukraine, and at claiming credit for deterring Russian from doing so? Impossible – the US cannot be stopped. But Germany, the country most likely to suffer the direct effects of war in the Ukraine, can […]

by Editor - Sunday, December 19th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The British Government announced this week that after cancelling   the coroner’s court inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess from alleged Russian Novichok attack, the public inquiry replacing the inquest will not start for more than a year — until February 2023. Sturgess died in Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, […]

by Editor - Monday, December 13th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with About the Russiagate operation that continues in the US, Richard Sakwa (lead image), a professor at the University of Kent, has gotten one thing right and one thing wrong. The wrong turns out to be the same thing as the right. Russiagate, he says, defining that as the narrative of Russian […]

by Editor - Monday, December 6th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with British government officials. state prosecutors,  and police have lied repeatedly in announcements over the past three years that they have issued European Arrest Warrants charging three Russian military officers with attempted murder using the Novichok chemical weapon against targets in England. The three Russians have been named in official British press […]

by Editor - Thursday, November 11th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré) died after a bathroom fall last December, the current chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), Richard Moore, announced by tweet that Cornwell had been “a giant of literature who left his mark on MI6 through his evocative and brilliant novels”.  By mark, […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 7th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russia bunker-buster information bomb, Catherine Belton’s (lead image) Putin’s People, proved to be a dud at a London ceremony last week.  In its award for the best non-fiction book about Russia for 2020, Pushkin House announced the winner was a retiring Oxford don whose “long and distinguished career” had displayed […]

by Editor - Monday, November 1st, 2021
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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.

by Editor - Monday, October 25th, 2021
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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 […]

by Editor - Monday, October 11th, 2021
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By Liane Theuerkauf, Munich, with introduction & illustrations by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On September 22, 2021, Dame Heather Hallett, the coroner appointed by the British government to conduct an inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, held a second hearing in court in London.  Sturgess died in Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, from […]

by Editor - Sunday, October 3rd, 2021
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