By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When you are the fastest growing tree on the street, every dog in the neighbourhood will try to lift his leg on you.

When the tree is Indian, the American dogs express their resentment. They are Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Howard Lutnick, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and Stephen Miller. They also tell each other privately they can’t understand the accent Indian officials use when speaking English. They don’t have the same disability when listening to Hebrew-accented Israelis.  

Lutnick has just been appointed by a decree President Donald Trump signed at the White House on Friday (February 6) as the American watchdog to control Indian import and export trade with countries Lutnick considers enemies – Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela. The decree says: “The Secretary of Commerce [Lutnick], in coordination with the Secretary of State [Rubio], the Secretary of the Treasury [Bessent], and any other senior official the Secretary of Commerce deems appropriate [Witkoff, Kushner, Miller], shall monitor whether India resumes directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil, as defined in section 7 of Executive Order 14329.”  

This is the sharp end of President Donald Trump’s exchange of tweets with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 2, announcing – Trump’s words – that “he is one of my greatest friends” and that together “our amazing relationship with India will be even stronger going forward, Prime Minister Modi and I are two people that GET THINGS DONE, something that cannot be said for most.”  

The watchdog  is one of the weapons US officials aim to wield against the Indians as the negotiations on terms for a US-Indian trade agreement – first begun in February 2025, halted by Trump seven months later, in August — have now “reached a framework for an Interim Agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade (Interim Agreement).”  That is the lead line in the “United States-India Joint Statement” which the White House released on February 6 following negotiations Rubio and Bessent held two days before with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

In his 9-line communiqué, Rubio identified no point of agreement with Jaishankar on “critical minerals exploration, mining and processing… shared energy security goals [and] expanding bilateral and multilateral cooperation through the Quad.”   The first of Rubio’s points is the so-called Pax Silica, launched by the US with its allies against trade with China. The second of Rubio’s points means the prevention of India’s oil and other trade with Russia; the third means the militarization of the Quad states – US, Japan, Australia and India – against China and Russia in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Straits of Malacca connecting them.  

Bessent’s Treasury office released no record or readout of his talks with Jaishankar on February 4. Instead, Bessent tweeted that they had “addressed the importance of securing supply chains, as well as other national and economic security issues of mutual interest.”  The Indian ministry released a single line and a hand-shake picture.  

Supply chain security was low on the priority list issued by the White House — 10^th of 12 points.  What it means is the scheme the Trump Administration started in December calling it Pax Silica: this is a plan for the US and its allies to combat Chinese and Russian systems of fabricating critical minerals into semiconductor chips and other components of advanced computers and artificial intelligence systems with dual, civilian and military, applications. The allies who have signed on so far are Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, South Korea, Singapore, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and UK.  Another NATO ally on the list is The Netherlands.  The domestic pressure on the Modi government to join up is coming from US-backed opposition politicians like Rahul Gandhi.  

Trump’s subordinates – Witkoff, Kushner, Lutnick, Bessent, Rubio, and Miller — remain uncertain of India and uncomfortable with Modi. The emergence last month of India as the new strategic protector of the UAE in combination with Russia has caught the Americans by surprise.  

Russian sources confirm that Witkoff’s and Kushner’s value in negotiations on the Ukraine war has dwindled. “They have been telling us Trump’s aim is to project American power to keep peace in Europe. We’ve been telling them we keep peace on our terms. Now, finally, they’ve got the message. They agree – Russia has won in Ukraine. Also, they have been bought out,” one source says in Moscow, referring to the dealmaking for US companies and bribery for the Trump family which have been presented by Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s negotiator for economic cooperation.

In their place at the Abu Dhabi negotiations with the Russian military delegation on February 4-5, and then in Muscat with the Iranians on February 6, Witkoff and Kushner have been subordinated by US commanders and military intelligence officers.

Projecting their personal aggression into flashpoints at home and abroad has been the Witkoff-Kushner strategy for escalation control, for exercising dominance everywhere at once. But it’s not a tactic which they can easily adjust or sequence — one trade war, one military front at a time — when they run into more resistance than they have anticipated; their costs go out of control;  their domestic constituencies lose confidence in them.

For the time being, Miller’s miscalculation in militarizing US cities, especially the  murders in Minneapolis, and in directing the President’s racist tweets, have stopped his ambition to succeed Rubio as National Security Adviser and forced him into invisibility.  Last year Miller had been one of the lead officials pushing the anti-India line and triggering Trump’s reversal of his personal goodwill towards Modi.   

Bessent’s and Rubio’s combination of the anti-Russia,  anti-China,  anti-India lines  has also been tempered by the resistance  their tactics have faced, not only  from Russia, Iran, China,  and India, but also from the leading Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

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by Editor - Sunday, February 8th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow, with Sahar Dadjoo, Teheran
  @bears_with

As tensions persist between Iran and the United States amid intensified military signaling and renewed talk of negotiations, critical questions remain about Washington’s real strategy and the risk of a broader regional conflict. In this context, Tehran Times spoke with John Helmer, a veteran journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Moscow, to examine the shifting balance of power and the prospects for de-escalation.

Published today here.  

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by Editor - Friday, February 6th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In Jeffrey Epstein’s decade between 2009 and 2019 he tried ever so hard to meet the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

That’s to say, between Epstein’s release from prison on his Florida state conviction and sentence for procuring a minor for prostitution and for soliciting a prostitute, and then his re-arrest and imprisonment in New York on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors, he asked his staff, friends, business associates, US Government retirees,  ex-government officials from Norway, Israel, UAE, and Japan,  and Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin (died in February 2017), to procure an invitation for him to meet Putin.

They succeeded in getting Epstein invitations to business promotions in Sochi, Vladivostok, and St. Petersburg, at which crowd meetings with Putin were promised. But Epstein refused.  On May 13, 2013, he claimed in an email to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that Putin “had asked that I meet him the same time as his economic conference. I told him no. If he wants to meet he will need to set aside real time and privacy. Let’s see what happens.”

Nothing ever did.

Epstein’s scheme was simple. He targeted one connection to make another connection he believed the first already had to the Kremlin in order to then trade the appearance of the Kremlin connection for Epstein to others willing to pay Epstein introducing, consulting or finder’s fees if the appearance of Putin’s agreement could be fabricated into money.

Epstein also needed to prove that his criminal conviction and jail time counted for nothing in international politics, investment banking, high society. Like washing money, this was reputation laundering.  

“You can explain to Putin,” Epstein told Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister and Council of Europe politician, “that there should be a sopshiticated [sic] Russian version of bitcoin, It would be the most advanced financial instrument available on a global basis”.  

This was amusingly familiar to a Russian, especially one who knew enough English to appreciate the double meaning of Epstein’s misspelling; more importantly, it exposes the naïve superiority complex he was demonstrating to Russians whose experience in laundering, transferring, and crypto-hiding amounted to multiple billions to trillions of dollars more than Epstein had ever handled. As a money launderer, Russians understood Epstein was never clever enough himself and employed no organization to work for him.  

Jagland did nothing with the email. Jagland could do nothing for himself except exaggerate the group session he had at the Kremlin in December 2016 when the Kremlin published an 8-line speech Putin gave.   Two years later, in December 2018,  there were even more officials with Jagland at the table and Putin’s communiqué was three lines shorter. Jagland’s refusal to withdraw support for European sanctions of Russia on Crimea and for prejudicial judgements of the European Court of Justice against Russia left him in a tupik – that’s Russian for dead end.  That’s where Jagland’s “connection” with Putin ended too.

Its remaining value to Jagland was to trade it to Epstein in return for an evening’s accommodation and entertainment at his Paris house. “Is it same prosedure [sic] as last time that I can stay with you,” Jagland asked Epstein.  “I promise not make noice [sic] or ruin you.”

In both directions, Jagland’s and Epstein’s, this operation was a hustle. Jagland got what he didn’t pay for; Epstein got nothing.

Epstein’s trafficking of Russian women was more successful. The women proved their exceptional beauty and their relatively low cost compared to American women, and thus they proved to be the commodity that asset hustlers like Epstein always appreciate. He bought them cheap and sold dear. Also, the Russian women have kept silent.

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by Editor - Thursday, February 5th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Three out of four Russians expect victory in the Ukraine war. Even more of them trust the Russian Army to achieve it – the sooner the better, the voters think.

Four out of ten Russians believe that the Special Military Operation will end this year; in the same proportion, they also believe there will be a domestic economic crisis this year.

One in four Russians think it is equally possible that there will be an armed clash with the United States and NATO countries;  mass clashes on the national territory or mass public protests.

This combination of growing public impatience and pessimism about the economy has been  reported from a Levada Centre nationwide poll using face-to-face interviews conducted between January 15 and 23; the results were published on  February 3.  

In a related report of the same polling results, Levada has revealed: “The majority of Russians, 61%, believe that it is necessary now to move to peace talks, but over the past month [December 2025 poll] their share has decreased by five percentage points. At the same time, the share of those who think it is necessary to continue military operations has increased to a third of respondents (31%, an increase of 6 percentage points)…The majority of respondents (59%) believe that if achieving  peace with Ukraine is not yet possible, Russia should escalate its strikes on Ukraine, including using new types of weapons.”  

That last line is the signal that Russian voters are growing impatient with President Vladimir Putin’s reluctance to fire the Oreshnik missile for decapitation of the Ukraine’s command-and-control centres, and his readiness to give in to President Donald Trump’s requests for moratoriums and ceasefires in the electric war campaign. Voter support for Putin’s performance remains highly stable at 84% approval, compared with 87% to 84% between August and November of last year; disapproval has remained between 11% and 13%.   The difference in these numbers is within the margin for  statistical error.

Unlike Putin, Russian voters want Generals Winter and Cholera to seize control of Kiev and Lvov sooner rather than later.

An analysis of a related Levada dataset by a Harvard University think tank has confirmed the conclusion that “significant parts of the Russian public could support escalation vis-à-vis Ukraine if peace remains out of reach. While a majority still favours negotiations over immediate military continuation, [there is]  growing support for more force, and a slight rise in support of the armed forces. Taken together, they indicate a possible hardening of Russians’ attitudes toward the conflict…Together, these trends point to possible further normalization of a long war and reduced public appetite for compromise in Russia.”  

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by Editor - Thursday, February 5th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The yanko and jingo-centric podcasters are being overtaken by the political realism of events. This is forcing a change of calculation in how the apparently powerless can and do defeat the apparently omnipotent without beating their chests, flogging their backs, or putting their adversaries’ heads in baskets.

Bribery of President Donald Trump, his sons and son-in-law, and their associates is also proving its value as a warfighting tactic. Those Americans will always retreat from the front to their counting houses so long as they are persuaded there will be more money to count if they go backwards rather than forwards.

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by Editor - Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Nuri al-Said, the long-serving but ill-fated Iraqi prime minister of the 1940s and 1950s, once said that you can rent an Arab but you can’t buy him.

On July 15, 1958, he ended up shot by an Iraqi Army coup, buried, dug up, and his corpse mutilated as it was dragged through the streets of Baghdad. His end confirmed his truth.

President Vladimir Putin knows better than most that the Nuri Pasha maxim applies to American government officials up to and including the presidents — except that they don’t honour their promises, demand more bribes, and survive intact to die in bed (most of them).  

Still, Putin has delegated Kirill Dmitriev (lead image left), a US-educated and trained investment banker, to deliver the bribes (left, right) to President Donald Trump (extreme right) and his go-betweens,  and return with what Dmitriev claims to be their promises for terms of settlement of the Ukraine war, the lifting of sanctions, and the release of about $300 billion in Central Bank of Russia (CBR) funds frozen and part-confiscated over the past four years.

Putin has done this so that he can ask the General Staff, the intelligence services, and the Security Council what they make of the deal by a show of thumbs up, thumbs down, after Dmitriev presents the costs and benefits of his proposal and the Trump administration’s response. Dmitriev was sent back to Miami last weekend.

When he returned to report to the Kremlin, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “there will be no details. You’ve heard the conceptual assessments from both sides, from Dmitriev and from Witkoff. In general, these were quite positive and constructive talks.”  Witkoff had tweeted the adjectives, “productive and constructive”.  

Witkoff also revealed that several Americans were with him at the meeting with Dmitriev: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner and Joshua Gruenbaum.   This is the first time Putin has authorized a single representative to meet a full US delegation. On January 22, in addition to Witkoff and Dmitriev, Kushner and Gruenbaum were matched at the Kremlin by Putin himself and Yury Ushakov, the Kremlin national security advisor.  

Bessent’s attendance in Miami signals the talks with Dmitriev covered terms for ending the US sanctions on Russian trade and assets, including the secondary sanctions on Indian and Chinese purchases of Russian oil. Bessent’s press office at the US Treasury has remained silent;  so too his Twitter stream.  

At the same time, Bessent has continued to sharpen sanctions against Iran, tweeting “the regime has chosen to squander what remains of the nation’s oil revenues on nuclear weapons development, missiles, and terrorist proxies around the world. President Trump stands with the people of Iran and has ordered Treasury to sanction members of the regime.  Treasury will continue to target Iranian networks and corrupt elites that enrich themselves at the expense of the Iranian people.  This includes the regime’s attempts to exploit digital assets to evade sanctions and finance cybercriminal operations.  Like rats on a sinking ship, the regime is frantically wiring funds stolen from Iranian families to banks and financial institutions around the world.  Rest assured. Treasury will act.”  

Bessent’s public attack at supper time on January 30 on “networks and corrupt elites” was not what he said privately to Dmitriev, representing Russian business networks and elites,  when they met at breakfast the next day. The selective sanctions relief which Dmitriev has been asking for, and the bribes he has been offering, have been understood in Moscow for a year now.  But criticism of this line and of Dmitriev’s role which has been gathering force in the Russian Security Council and State Duma has so far been kept behind closed doors and off the record.

A Moscow source in a position to know says Dmitriev is now proposing to reclaim the $300 billion of CBR reserves and place them in an international fund to be jointly managed by Dmitriev, Trump’s sons and son-in-law, and Witkoff’s sons.  After some small allocations have been made to Trump’s Gaza redevelopment and to the post-armistice Ukrainian regime, most of the money would then be invested in joint US and Russian projects whose disbursement would legalize the American bribe-taking, and add Russian takers as well.

“Look,” the source says: “Trump must get the money out of the European repositories. From our point of view, the increase in value of the CBR’s gold reserves has almost overtaken the value of the frozen cash reserves.  This scheme takes the money out of the hands of [Central Bank Governor Elvira] Nabiullina: no one wants her to get her hands back on the money. So what’s wrong with investing the money better than she has done?  Everybody gets rich.”

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by Editor - Monday, February 2nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Realism in politics is M +V+ B = P.

That’s to say: Money plus Votes plus Bullets equal Power.  The equation is simple arithmetic – everyone can count.  

But almost everyone can count on missing one or more of the variables —  usually all three of them —  so power is very unequally distributed in most countries, most times, most lives. It is suffered much more than it is enjoyed: –M + –V + –B = –P.  Minus P is powerlessness. That’s the state of being a victim, vassal, slave.

This P power is not the kind you draw from a rally (podcast) when a Billy Graham-type tells you he will fill you full of the P of conviction on condition you believe in him and pay him a cash subscription. You can trust him to give you your money’s worth because, he says,  he is a veteran of the CIA or US Army (officer not rank), or a Chicago professor,  or a Pulitzer Prize winner from New York, or a high-rating ex-employee of Fox News. In the US, these Billy Graham-types make fortunes selling Minus P as PH – Payoff in Heaven.   

In politics, might not only makes right; it also makes righteousness. What can happen, therefore, as two adversaries at war with each other test when PH ≥ P— that’s when their righteousness in Heaven is greater than their power on Earth. This is the war between Supreme Leader Donald Trump and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, between the US and Iran.

According to Trump in a tweet of June 15, 2025, “we know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”  Twelve days later, on June 27, 2025, Trump claimed: “I knew EXACTLY where he [Khamenei] was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces, by far the Greatest and Most Powerful in the World, terminate his life. I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’”  

Khamenei tweeted in reply: “The US President threatens us. With his absurd rhetoric, he demands that the Iranian people surrender to him. They should make threats against those who are afraid of being threatened. The Iranian nation isn’t frightened by such threats.”   “Trump should know”, Khamenei said this month, after the failure of the internal riots, “that  world tyrants such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza were brought down at the peak of their arrogance. He too will be brought down”.   “The US  had made extensive preparations to orchestrate this sedition. This sedition was a prelude to even bigger schemes. The Iranian nation defeated the US.”  

There is an arithmetic of force and firepower ratios on each side – the number of US missiles that can be fired before the ships must sail away for reloads; the number of Iranian drones and missiles required to overwhelm US defences or deter approaching aircraft; the survivability of the launching platforms; the number of casualties in a 2-day war, a 7-day war, a protracted war. This is the arithmetic of the B, bullets.

Then there is the arithmetic of the V, votes at the US midterm elections, and the M, money inflation at gas stations across the US. Trump is counting on his B+ adding to his V and keeping his M from rising sharply. Khamenei is counting on neutralizing Trump’s B to zero and his V and M to minus by closing the Strait of Hormuz and surviving US strikes for long enough to project and protract the war into the US itself.

Election Day in the US falls on November 3; the summer driving season starts on Memorial Day, May 25. Khamenei’s calculation is to protract the P equation for less than sixteen weeks – or convince the money, vote and bullet counters in Washington in advance that this is what he can  do.  Not even the Billy Graham-type PH zealots in the White House are confident he can be destroyed before then.

With Lieutenant General (retd) P R Shankar, view or listen to the new Gunners Shot podcast for the political realism needed for now.  

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by Editor - Sunday, February 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On January 27 President Donald Trump (lead image) announced: “In June, we obliterated Iran’s nuclear capacity in Operation Midnight Hammer. You saw that. People have been waiting for 22 years to do that, and we were right at the end. They were about a month away from having a nuclear weapon. We had to do it. And just — and by the way, there’s another beautiful armada floating beautifully toward Iran right now, so we’ll see.”

The contradiction between the “obliteration” of the Iran threat seven months ago and the resumption of Trump’s attack now has drawn no Kremlin response.

On January 13, the Foreign Ministry condemned the regime change operation by the US then under way inside Iran. “Hostile external forces,” declared Maria Zakharova, the Ministry spokesman, “are seeking to exploit the mounting public tension to destabilise and undermine the Iranian state…We unequivocally condemn the subversive external interference in Iran’s internal political processes… The threats emanating from Washington regarding further military strikes against the Islamic Republic are categorically unacceptable.”  

As the internal regime change operation was defeated, Trump has retaliated with the escalation of his military strike capacity outside Iran’s borders.

The Iranian response to this is to threaten the strategy long understood in Washington to be the killer of US presidents at election time – blood and oil.  That is the combination of sharply rising US battle casualties and spikes in the price of crude oil and retail gasoline at the pump ahead of mid-term and presidential elections.

“A limited [US] strike is an illusion”, announced Ali Shamkani, representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Iran’s equivalent of the US National Security Council or the Russian Security Council.   “Any military action by America, of any kind and at any level,” Shamkani has said, “will be considered the start of a war, and the response will be immediate, comprehensive, and unprecedented, directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and at all who support the aggressor.”  Shamkani posted this on the evening of Wednesday, January 28.  

Two days later, Friday January 30, Ali Larijani, went to Moscow and presented the full Iranian war plan to President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Larijani, a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), is the current Secretary of the Iranian Security Council.

This was the Kremlin sequence: Putin’s telephone calls to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  and then Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on January 16; a summit meeting at the Kremlin with the UAE ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan (MBZ),  on January 29;  and then the  January 30 meeting with Larijani.  The Kremlin record reveals no photograph of the Larijani meeting and no communiqué of their agenda or the participation in the talks of military officers from the Russian and Iranian sides.   

Putin had been recorded as telling Netanyahu a fortnight ago that he was “making mediation efforts and promoting a constructive dialogue involving all concerned parties.” .  Two hours later, the communiqué reported Putin telling Pezeshkian: “Russia and Iran unanimously and consistently support deescalating the tensions — both surrounding Iran and in the region as a whole — as soon as possible and resolving any emerging issues via exclusively political and diplomatic means. The leaders confirmed their mutual commitment to further strengthening the strategic partnership between Russia and Iran.”  

What military assistance Russia is providing, according to the Russia-Iran treaty of last year,  to counter US and Israeli attack was the key issue on the table with Larijani; it remains secret.

There have been Iranian media reports of a joint live-fire naval exercise in the Sea of Oman engaging Iranian, Russian and Chinese vessels between now and February 2. However, there has been no public confirmation from Moscow or Beijing of the participation of Russian and Chinese naval units.   

President Xi Jinping’s ongoing purge of the military has left no Chinese general or admiral with combat experience and unstable command-control relations between Xi’s politburo and the Central Military Commission. This disruption of war readiness has been confirmed indirectly in the only official reaction to Trump’s armada threat against Iran. According to Guo Jiakun, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, on January 23: “China hopes that Iran will maintain national stability and that all parties will cherish peace, exercise restraint, and resolve differences through dialogue.”  

Chinese hope has never been recorded as so wistful and wishful.  In international politics, wistful is retrospection over power which failed to strike target; wishful is the forward plan for hitting target in the untested future.  

The US Government has also been expressing wishful thinking. Two weeks ago, the US Energy Information Administration published its prediction of no disruption of the international oil market in the coming months;  no Hormuz Strait spike in the oil price now;  and falling retail gasoline prices by the time the American summer driving season begins, along with the Congressional election campaign. “We expect oil prices will decline in 2026, as global oil production exceeds global oil demand, causing oil inventories to rise. Global inventories continue increasing into 2027, albeit at a slower pace. We forecast the Brent crude oil price will average $56 per barrel (b) in 2026, 19% less than in 2025, then average $54/b in 2027…We forecast U.S. gasoline prices in 2026 will average just over $2.90 per gallon (gal), a decrease of nearly 20 cents/gal from 2025. In 2027, we forecast prices to remain mostly flat at an annual average of just over $2.90/gal.”  

The crude oil futures market is indicating a very different expectation for the Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) price markers. Since January 1, Brent is up 19%; WTI up 21%.  

The Kremlin has now sponsored an unusual warning, published yesterday as an editorial in Vzglyad, the Kremlin-backed security analysis platform. This is a warning to Trump to call off his bluff and to Khamenei not to call it.  

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by Editor - Friday, January 30th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Trump Administration and its NATO allies are clear:

They will escalate their war against Russia at sea, deploying their navies to enforce trade blockades, ship sabotage and seizures, and the closure of sea lanes, and to launch “pre-emptive” attacks before their targets can defend themselves. This is sea war to achieve regime change on land.

Trump’s current targets are Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, China, and India.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate Committee hearing on Wednesday that if these targets attempt to deter the US escalation by raising their guard, the US Navy will shoot first.

“It’s wise and prudent,” Rubio said, “to have a force posture within the region that could respond and potentially, not necessarily what’s going to happen, but if necessary, preemptively prevent the attack against thousands of American servicemen and other facilities in the region. And our allies. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but that’s I think what you’re seeing now is the ability to posture assets in the region to defend against what could be an Iranian threat against our personnel.”  

The Putin Administration is less than clear on what it will do to defend its flag vessels and the oil cargoes it is dispatching to its allies.

On the Anglo-American operation to seize the Russian-flagged tanker Marinera, off the west coast of Scotland on January 7, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced it was an act of piracy, not an act of war against the Russian flag nor an act of war as trade blockades are treated in the United Nations Charter.  

According to a legal source close to Moscow, the US warrants for the seizure of the Marinera  and arrest of the master and crew claim the vessel was operating in violation of US sanctions against Iran, not US sanctions against Russia.   

There has been no explanation for the failure of the Marinera’s Russian naval escort, a submarine and a corvette, to defend against the “pirates”. The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, called for release of the two  Russian crew on the vessel, and then thanked the US for their release. When this did not materialize as advertised, the ministry complained of the delay. On January 28, the two Russians were released and were “on their way home”, according to Zakharova.  

The captain and first officer of the vessel appear to have been Georgian; they remain under arrest in the UK on an extradition application by the US for prosecution in a US court. The two Russians and the Indian majority of the 26-man crew are being released and repatriated “in line with standard UK immigration and legal procedures”.   No favour has been shown by either the US or the UK to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

On January 22, the French military attacked and seized the tanker Grinch in international waters of the Mediterranean, off the Spanish coast, and took the vessel and crew to Marseille. The  Comoros-flagged vessel was carrying a cargo of Russian crude oil to a destination in either Turkey or India; the captain is Indian.  There has been no public Russian or Indian response in defence of the Grinch’s cargo, the vessel, or the crew.   

On the tightening of the US blockade against Cuba, including threats against blockade-busting  supplies of oil, Russian and Mexican, to the island,  Zakharova announced yesterday: “Representatives of the US administration have threatened Cuba many times, including by mentioning their readiness to blow up everyone there and trying to force Havana to make a deal…The United States has used every trick to tighten the blockade, including by adding Cuba to the infamous US list of state sponsors of terrorism…we express the hope that allegations contained in these media reports are groundless, and that common sense eventually prevails in Washington…We reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the people and authorities of fraternal Cuba.”  

Russian sources believe the Kremlin’s will and the Russian Navy’s readiness to defend against these attacks are wavering. According to Oleg Tsarev, the Crimea-based leader of the Ukrainian opposition, this is “the art of great maritime patience.”

 “The EU”, Tsarev wrote on January 27, “intends to close the Baltic Sea for the shadow fleet of Russia…Almost half of the offshore oil export from Russia goes through the Baltic Sea. Now the conditions are being created in which every exit of a Russian tanker from the Baltic can end with its arrest or forced entry to [EU] port for inspection… When the EU moves from words to deeds, the flow of Russian oil through the Baltic will lead to disastrous consequences for the budget and put the state on the brink of survival. Russia may continue to exercise the art of great maritime patience but in case of detention of Russian tankers in the Baltic Sea, you need to have a plan with specific countermeasures.”  

On the escalating US threat against Russian use of the Arctic sea lanes – the Northern Route, as it is known in Russian – President Vladimir Putin announced on January 21: “what is happening around Greenland does not concern us in any way.”   No public elaboration has followed in Moscow.  

On the new declaration of the Baltic and North Sea states, issued on Monday, to  stop and seize Russian oil cargoes and the tankers carrying them, whether Russian flagged or not, has so far drawn no public Russian Government reaction. The declaration explicitly blames the Russian alternative fleet running the gauntlet of US and EU sanctions for creating “new emerging safety situations…particularly in the Baltic Sea region. These disturbances, originating from the Russian Federation, degrade the safety of international shipping. All vessels are at risk.”  

Vessels will be stopped and seized, the document proposes, if they “sail under the flags of two or more states”; if they turn off vessel identification and tracking signals; if they “conduct ship-to-ship transfers without sufficient and timely notification to the coastal state in whose exclusive economic zone the transfer is to take place”; and other coastal state route conditions.  

“These are new challenges,” a well-placed Moscow source responds. “If you act like a pirate, you will be treated as a pirate.” The Russian oil exporters and transporters, the source said,  “can’t continue indulging in this. Russians cannot outrun the blockade unless they stop being pirates. If they act as pirates, it’s not an act of war to stop them.” The source adds: “we must begin by flying the Russian flag, crewing the vessels with Russians, and deploying armed units on each vessel. That was the method for dealing with Somali pirates. We have to take the high road – legitimize vessel registration and the cargoes. Only then can the Russians legimitately use the armed forces to defend, and also deter attacks.”

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by Editor - Thursday, January 29th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the first time since the negotiations to end the Ukraine war began, President Vladimir Putin has sent as the chief Russian negotiator a General Staff officer and military intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov.

The two Russians who have been closest to Putin, Vladimir Medinsky and Kirill Dmitriev, are not at the table. Neither is the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.

In Abu Dhabi on Friday (January 23), Kostyukov faced the Americans Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Daniel Driscoll, and General Alexus Grynkewich (lead image, left). Driscoll is the Secretary of the Army, in the running to replace Peter Hegseth at the Pentagon, and a protégé of Vice President JD Vance.  Grynkewich has been in charge of the losses on the Ukrainian battlefield since May 2024 when he was head of operations at the Pentagon and then as chief of the European Command (EUCOM) from July 2025.

At Abu Dhabi each of the Americans displayed open-neck, casual clothing. This dress-down Friday costume was a calculated insult to both the Ukrainian delegation – Rustem Umerov in uniform and Kirill Budanov in suit and tie—and to the Russians, Kostyukov and his second at the table, General Alexander Fomin. Kostyukov wore a dark civilian suit and a white collared shirt buttoned at the neck. But Kostyukov’s tie wasn’t tightly drawn. Was he sending the Russian Army’s message that it hasn’t reached the point of strangulation for the other side, yet?

The American signal was that they are dictating terms; that they retain escalation control over the Russians and they must capitulate, along with the NATO allies and the Zelensky regime. This is not the “coordinating” role which, after the two-day meetings concluded, Witkoff  announced. “On Friday and Saturday, the United States coordinated a trilateral meeting alongside Ukraine and Russia, graciously hosted by the United Arab Emirates. Talks were very constructive, and plans were made to continue conversations next week in Abu Dhabi. President Trump and his entire team are dedicated to bringing peace to this war.”  

Russian sources believe Witkoff’s stop to “this war” is no stop to the continuation of the war against Russia which the US, with the NATO allies, continues to escalate on land northward to Finland and Greenland; in the nuclear arms race in space;  and at sea on all of Russia’s trade routes – the Baltic Sea through the Danish Straits, the Northern (Arctic) Route through the Bering Strait, the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean, Caribbean,  and the Indian Ocean.

This larger peace is what Putin claims Trump agreed in the “understandings of Anchorage, Alaska” – the terms the two presidents discussed last August before Trump cut their meeting short and flew home.

“Naturally, we do not want to publicly go into the details of the provisions that are being discussed. And therefore, I cannot and will not tell you exactly what formula is meant by the Anchorage formula (формулой Анкориджа),” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, announced on Friday.

“There is a high dynamic. The Americans, as intermediaries, are rushing against time. They are in a hurry. They can be understood. This is not a quick process,” Peskov told a reporter on Sunday. “And now, in fact, the essence of the situation is that a certain formula for resolving the territorial issue was developed in Anchorage and on the eve of Anchorage. And now it is very important to implement it.”  

Peskov was not asked, and the Kremlin is not yet acknowledging, that the US side has changed Putin’s “Anchorage formula” by introducing two new conditions for “resolving the territorial issue”. They were tabled at Putin’s meeting with Witkoff, Kushner and Joshua Gruenbaum, the Chabad devotee who has joined the negotiations for Putin’s agreement to the US takeover of Gaza through Trump’s Board of Peace (BOP). The second new Trump demand to add to the “Anchorage formula” is Putin’s acceptance of the US takeover of Greenland, which Yury Ushakov acknowledged in his read-out from the Kremlin meeting.  

“During the meeting in the Kremlin, we also discussed Donald Trump’s idea of a Board of Peace, a host of regional matters and the Greenland issue,” Ushakov admitted.   

Putin’s new concessions in this three-way swap have stimulated dissent in Moscow. The Kremlin has replied with an editorial on Friday in Vzglyad, the semi-official security analysis platform, headlined: “Moscow [Putin] has made an elegant diplomatic move in a subtle game with the United States”.  

“By supporting Washington’s initiatives, the Kremlin is showing how productive an equal Russian-American dialogue can be for the whole world, and especially for its hottest regions. And how useless and counterproductive Europe is in this sense…But why should Russia indiscriminately reject this proposal? Trump is quite sincerely striving for a Ukrainian settlement, so why not assume that he is pursuing the same goals in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?… Rejecting such initiatives means cutting off opportunities for ourselves in advance, blocking one of the zones for playing on the world chessboard, and even publicly refusing to interact with the leading Western power. Moreover, the Peace Council does not currently touch upon or discuss any of Russia’s interests related, for example, to its own…It is logical that Trump, within the framework of his own dealmaking logic, considers this hint – and will be at least additionally motivated to take a respectful step in return, which is important for Russia’s interests.”  

There is no consensus among the senior policymakers on the Security Council that there is anything “respectful” in Trump’s tactics or anything to be relied upon as he continues to change his “Anchorage formula” by upping the ante.

For the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev has announced that time is running out for Trump to accept the year-long extension of time for negotiation of new strategic arms limitation terms when the START Treaty expires in a week’s time – on February 5.  There has been “a shift in the right direction but the movement is still very weak,” Medvedev said in a lengthy interview published today. “Donald Trump is initially unstable in political guidelines… We must make sure that Washington is really ready not in words, but in practice to respect our indigenous security interests. And able to work on an equal footing on a common reduction in conflict potential.”  

“Unequal footing” — that was the signal from the dress-down US delegation in Abu Dhabi.

Strategic arms limitations “must be mutual and parallel. And this position remains in force if no clarifications follow in the US approach by February 5,” Sergei Ryabkov, the first deputy foreign minister said over the weekend.  He also conceded that there has been no follow-up on the Anchorage formula from Trump’s agencies. “It is counterproductive to hold high-level events that are later deemed fruitless.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry has also had belatedly to acknowledge that Trump has not released the Russian crew members of the Marinera, as had been announced with thanks by the Ministry spokesman,  Maria Zakharova,  on January 9.  Worse, the British Government is refusing Russian consular access to the jailed crew.  

In the new podcast from India with Lieutenant General P R Shankar and Brigadier Arun Saghal, we discuss each of Trump’s war tactics and Putin’s negotiating responses as their combination is interpreted by Russia’s strategic allies – India, China, and Iran. Click to view or listen to the Sunday morning broadcast.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 25th, 2026
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