Pokrovsk, in the northwestern corner of Donetsk region, is almost a Russian city again.
Established as a minor Russian rail junction in 1880, it was badly damaged by the Italians and Germans who captured the city between 1941 and 1943, killing more than 8,000 Red Army defenders, 5,000 residents, and all the Jews. After the war, the city, then named Krasnoarmeiskoye and later Krasnoarmeisk, more than doubled to a peak of around 80,000 in the last years of the Soviet Union. The city economy was based on the area’s mines which worked to dig out the largest coal reserves in the Ukrainian territory.
The coalmines were taken over in the post-1991 Ukrainian free-for-all by Rinat Akhmetov’s Metinvest group. Akhmetov, a Donetsk native and son of a coalminer, declared earlier this year: “Ukraine hopes Pokrovsk will feed its industry with coal for decades more from estimated reserves of 200 million tonnes. For that to happen, the country’s army must stop Russia’s creeping advance despite being hampered by ammunition shortages caused by a Republican-inspired halt to US military aid and Europe’s failure to rapidly expand arms production.”
Akhmetov dictated that from London where he owns many homes.
The defeat of the Zelensky regime in the Donbass has ended Akhmetov’s production chain of coal from Pokrovsk, coke from Avdeyevka, and steel from Mariupol. Pokrovske Coal has reported that from the first half of 2023 to the first half of this year, its mine output has dropped by 25%, from 1.6 million tonnes of coal concentrate to 1.2 million tonnes, “because of optimisation of mining operations amid changes in geological conditions.” Akhmetov’s annual production reports don’t reveal the volume of coal and coal concentrate produced at Pokrovsk.
He has engaged to a New York law firm to sue Russia for his losses.
The population of Pokrovsk city remained steady at about 60,000 in 2014 through 2021. It is now estimated to have dropped to 26,000 at the start of this month, when the Ukrainian military ordered the evacuation of civilians. Russian has been the native language of almost two-thirds of the population
Born in Pokrovsk and a resident of the city for 30 years, a professional psychologist and newspaper editor left the city ahead of the final battle between advancing Russian forces and the Ukrainian retreat. Her name is not published to protect family members who have remained. In the form of a question-and-answer interview, this is her story.
As a rule, on these pages I (Gilbert Doctorow, lead image) do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my essays spontaneously asked me to comment on the points Helmer makes in the article in question. I now will do just that.
“The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twist of 1838 who began the popularity of combining law and judges with donkeys.
In a court hearing, Dickens wrote, Mr Bumble — victim of a woman whom he wanted to marry for her money, but who turned out to be more domineering than he expected — was told that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. “ ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot’”. Dickens’s characterization of Bumble – self-important, stupid, hypocritical – has turned into the noun bumbledom, which describes the pomposity of petty officials of the state.
An expert source claims that Bumble’s expression has been gaining steadily in popularity over the past 186 years.
And so it has also come to pass — more uniquely than ever before in English legal history, more than even Dickens can have imagined — that a retired English judge named Anthony Hughes (lead image, left) – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — has put on public display his personal combination of all three — Bumble, Bumbledom, and the law as an ass.
Hughes did this in a five-page ruling he issued on September 23. Hughes is directing the secret inquiry into two events on the British Government’s road to war against Russia in the Ukraine — the alleged Russian Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess of June 2018, following the alleged Russian Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal of March 2018.
Sturgess died; the Skripals survived. The book tells the full story.
Hughes has ruled the Skripals will not and must not be called to give evidence, neither in open court, nor by remote videolink, nor in tape-recorded voice, nor even in the written transcript of what English police claim the Skripals said under questioning in 2018.
The two survivors of the only Russian Novichok poisoning ever alleged to have occurred outside Russia will not now be subjected to cross-examination or to any form of forensic questioning that is the requirement of the English criminal law, nor to their physical appearance in court that is their fundamental right under the English legal doctrine of habeas corpus.
“I have concluded that neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal will be called to give oral evidence,” Hughes has announced. “I have no doubt that the public exposure which would follow these witnesses being called would be intrusive and uncomfortable and would risk disrupting both their daily personal and family lives and those of people connected to them in many different ways…The overwhelming risk, which quite alters the position in the present case, is of physical attack on one or both of the Skripals. There is every reason to be satisfied that an attack similar to that which appears to have taken place in 2018 remains a real risk, either at the hands of persons with the same interest as the 2018 attackers, or via others interested in supporting the same supposed aim, if either Sergei or Yulia can be identified and their current whereabouts discovered.”
Hughes has come to judgement here — days before he commences what he calls open proceedings — on what the entire process of his inquiry has yet to substantiate in evidence and to decide. Hughes has ruled that the Russian state, through its agents, attacked and attempted to kill the Skripals, and aim to do so again if Hughes lets the Skripals appear before him in any form at all.
Verifiable evidence of what the Skripals themselves believe – if they are alive — is to be substantiated only by their police guards. It is this police and MI6 record – compiled in the absence of lawyers representing the Skripals — which Hughes has now ruled to accept in violation of all the British rules of the admissibility of evidence.
“Having considered the representations of those responsible for their present security,” Hughes has judged, “I am more than satisfied that it would simply not be possible to maintain proper security if either of them were to be called to give evidence. That would be so whether they gave evidence from an open witness box, or by means of some electronic link from a remote room. In either case their present integrated security arrangements could not be maintained consistently with the necessity of being brought to a suitable location which is itself secure and which has an electronic link which is immune to interception. Moreover, if they were to be seen, or their voices heard, there could be no proper control of the likelihood that people who may have dealings with them (however casual or innocent) would recognise them and that that recognition would become more widely known, whether through social or other media or otherwise.”
As Bumble said, “if the law says that, the law is a ass.”
Dickens’s town beadle had such a high sense of his own importance, he failed to notice when he was making an ass of himself, as well as of the law. Hughes hasn’t read the book.
by Slobodan Despot, Montreux, and John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov (aka Paul Du Rove, lead imagelower right)) has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron (upper right) by their common friend, Xavier Niel (upper left), a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex business, including paedophilia, which also ended in a plea bargain with all charges dropped.
Durov issued his announcement of changes in Telegram’s terms of internet service and user privacy on September 23. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests. These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods.”
Durov claimed that Telegram’s search feature “has been abused by people who violated our terms of service to sell illegal goods. Over the past few weeks [his staff had used artificial intelligence to ensure that] all the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. We won’t let bad actors jeopardise the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”
Four days later on September 27 in an interview on a television channel owned by one of Niel’s business partners, he claimed the credit for supporting Durov after Durov had telephoned him for help. Niel had come to the rescue, he explained, because Durov was his “copain”. “First of all, for me he didn’t cross the line because he wasn’t convicted. What I know is that, once you have been in prison for having had legal problems, everyone disappears. Everyone disappears in this setting. Me, when I have a buddy [copain — chum, mate, pal, friend] who is in difficulty and who makes a phone call to me and well, here I am, here I am.”
Niel has not disclosed the extent of the behind-the-scenes discussions held with Macron, who has revealed his own special interest in the case after it was initiated, not by the French internet regulators or prosecutors, but by the foreign intelligence agency, Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE).
In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper.
Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself – pay lucrative profits in fact.
How profitable the bribery and killing methods of American decapitation of the secular Arab nationalists have been since 1943 is the story told in The Jackals’ Wedding.
The combination of decapitation and genocide now being pursued by the Israelis lacks the usual cost-accounting restrictions. This is because the imperial ideologies have turned into God-dictated duty, Crusader zealotry revived, but this time Judaeo rather than Christian, rabbinical rather than papal.
It is also because the US government is paying the bill.
Faith in the transubstantiation of the Jewish state would wither away much quicker than the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem without US cash, capital, and underwriter guarantees. That kingdom lasted 192 years; Israel is 76 years old; Zionism, 127 years.
In self-defence, popular resistance and national liberation of the Arabs, religious conviction can only be as effective as there is military capacity for the fight. The will to fight without the weapons is doomed; just as the war-fighting capacities of the Arabs are doomed if they are inadequate – sabotaged and betrayed off the battlefield; out-gunned if used in combat; held back without a fight.
For reminder of how long the present long war will be, let’s repeat this from the beginning last October.
The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019.
At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum. “Over 15,000 people attended the forum in St Petersburg,” Medinsky counted. “It lasted almost five days: it started earlier and ended later than scheduled… it was attended by 96 countries and saw the signing of over 90 international contracts for museum exhibitions, guest performances and exchanges…for the first time, and this is a very good trend, the forum was not just a club for cultural figures but also a place that attracted a lot of attention from the younger generation. Tens of thousands of St Petersburg students went to the forum.”
Putin said next to nothing: “Yes…Why?..Good…Very good…A very good festival, we need to cooperate with them…Good. Thank you.”
Eight weeks later on January 24, 2020, the Kremlin announced that Putin had removed Medinsky from the culture ministry, and instead appointed him an assistant to the President. There were no other details in the official announcement; nothing leaked then or later to the press on whether this was a demotion or promotion. What is certain is that Medinsky’s talk of cultural events was camouflage. Putin had told Medinsky he was changing his role for one of the most personal foreign policy operations on Putin’s agenda.
This didn’t materialize in public until Medinsky appeared as the leader of the Russian delegation to negotiate end-of-war terms with the Ukrainian government in Istanbul between March 29 and April 1, 2022.
Medinsky was sharply criticized by the General Staff, State Duma, and press for the terms he initialled in the draft agreement. After these domestic attacks combined to reverse Putin’s support for the pact and the Kiev regime appeared to withdraw under Anglo-American orders, Medinsky disappeared from view. But he has retained the role of Putin’s negotiator in the preparation of a sequel agreement, Istanbul-II.
He reappeared publicly at the Kremlin on July 5, 2024, when Medinsky was listed by the Kremlin in negotiation of end-of-war terms between Putin and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, and through Orban, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. In the Kremlin communiqué of the Orban talks, Medinsky was ranked ahead of foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov. The Kremlin has not explained what the former expert on Russian culture and history was doing there. Despite evidence made public by Orban himself, the Kremlin has denied the discussion in which Medinsky participated was about terms for an end of the Ukraine war with the US, after the presidential election on November 5.
A Moscow source confirms Medinsky was identified to Orban as Putin’s personal messenger. “He remains the chief negotiator but he has not been seen with the Chinese or with the Indians. This means that Putin is only serious about Orban – of course not about Orban, but Trump whom Orban went on to meet in Miami on July 11.”
Then last week, on September 20, Medinsky reappeared again in public, this time – and for his first time – at a weekly session of the Security Council.
According to the Kremlin communiqué, Putin began by announcing “we all know that in recent years, history has often been used as a means of achieving political goals with regard to our country. This is often done in an opportunistic and unscrupulous manner. As such, this can be viewed as a current policy issue, and our country, its official authorities need to define their attitude to it. Therefore, I propose that we discuss this today. We have two speakers, Mr Medinsky and Mr Lavrov.”
What Medinsky had to say about Russian history remains top secret. His Security Council speech has not been quoted on the Kremlin website; the Kremlin’s Telegram platform has ignored it. Asked for a copy or a summary of Medinsky’s remarks, the Kremlin press office replied: “If we get it, we’ll add it. Follow the website”. So far as Moscow political observers can remember, this is the first time that an official statement on Russian history has been classified.
Russian sources believe the reason is the same as Medinsky’s November 2019 meeting with Putin. It is camouflage. Only this time, the sources add, Putin’s purpose is to expose the camouflage himself, confirming he is ready for Istanbul-II, and is employing Medinsky in the president’s effort to override opposition to the end-of-war negotiations from the General Staff and from the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, former president Dmitry Medvedev.
“Whatever Medinsky says is Putin’s thoughts exactly, more powerfully than Medvedev,” a Moscow source explains. “Putin wants the Americans to understand this.”
By making public Medinsky’s presence with Orban on July 5, and now at the Security Council on September 20, Putin is sending a signal to Trump, and also to the Biden Administration, that they should reciprocate with a negotiating signal of their own and stop the Kiev regime’s plans to escalate on the battlefield, with F-16 operations, and with long-range missile attacks on Russian territory.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeated his promise to end the Ukraine war the day after his re-election with a bribe for President Vladimir Putin and his two pro-American constituencies, the Central Bank of Russia and the Russian oligarchs.
Applauded by an audience of New York lawyers and businessmen on Thursday afternoon, September 5, Trump answered a question from a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, Rodgin Cohen, who asked if Trump “would strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions, particularly Russia.”
Trump replied that sanctions “ultimately kill the dollar and kill everything the dollar represents. We have to continue to have that be the world currency…I think that if we lose the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war. That would make us a third world country…you’re losing Iran; you’re losing Russia.China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant one…I want to use sanctions as little as possible.”
Instead, Trump proposed penalty tariffs on hostile-country trade with the US. “I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs…The biggest threat you have is that you lose that [dominant] currency, and we have lost something we can never get back…. If we win [on November 5], I believe I can settle that war while I am president-elect, before I ever get into office… Sanctions have to be used very judiciously. We have things much more powerful, actually, than sanctions – we have trade [tariffs] but we cannot lose our dollar standard. Very important.” Minute 1:02-1:06.
The mainstream US media have not reported what Trump said. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post – all supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in their campaign coverage – ignored the Economic Club meeting entirely. The Hill, a Washington-based publication for political specialists, headlined its report, “5 takeaways from Trump’s economic address in New York”, but the report didn’t include the sanctions proposal.
Sergei Kirienko, a former prime minister of Russia and currently the Number-2 man in charge of President Vladimir Putin’s staff, believes Russia can win the information war against the US and its allies.
In his meetings behind closed doors at the Kremlin, Kirienko has revealed that he thinks Americans are so trusting in their press like the Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News, that if fake Post, CNN, Fox, and other dummies of the US media can be created to report positive propaganda about Russia, instead of the negative propaganda these media usually run, Americans will be convinced to switch sides in the war to destroy the Russian army on the Ukrainian battlefield, and the war of US sanctions to destroy the Russian economy.
Kirienko also believes this can be achieved by spending less than $5 million of Kremlin money on an information war consultant named Ilya Gambashidze.
This is the evidence presented in a Philadelphia court this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an indictment for money laundering and trademark counterfeiting alleged against Gambashidze and his associates. Without saying how the agency got hold of his records, the FBI has quoted at length from Kirienko’s remarks to Gambashidze “between April 2022 and April 2023…[in] notes relat[ing] to at least 20 Russian Presidential Administration meetings.”
During that time the FBI charges that Kirienko, Gambashidze and other Russian officials decided to implement “foreign malign influence campaigns…designed to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters in U.S. and foreign elections by posing as citizens of those countries, impersonating legitimate news outlets, and peddling Russian government propaganda under the guise of independent media brands.”
The records of Gambashidze’s notetaking may not be authentic. Gambashidze may have misquoted, misrepresented or exaggerated what Kirienko told him. Gambashidze himself is quoted by the FBI as saying the evidence against him “is not completely true.”
The owner of Telegram, as far as we know, is still in France. The bird without a nest now lives with a police ankle tag on its foot. It is still unclear why he himself landed in the trap set. But we are beginning to understand how he thinks. The intelligence services too, no doubt.
