JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb.com) — Russian steelmakers are super-sensitive about this year’s European Union (EU) quota on imports of Russian steel, and for two good reasons. One is that Russian government policy may be about to change, dramatically. The other is that more than four months of negotiations between trade officials on both sides have failed to […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 11th, 2004
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In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, the 18th century French expose of the way vicious people plot to undermine virtue, it is allowed to a manservant to point out to the villain, the Vicomte de Valmont, that “going to bed with a girl only means getting her to do something she wants to do; but from that […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 25th, 2004
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For a decade Washington has been backing the Turkish and Azerbaihan governments to steer the export of Caspian region crude oil away from Russia, Russia’s newest riposte has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, and open up the shortest, cheapest, and most lucrative oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 4th, 2004
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Picasso was late for dinner at Gertrude Stein’s in Paris in 1907, when Alice B. Toklas said to him, after the painter had been seated beside her, that she liked his portrait of Stein on the wall above them very much. To which Picasso famously replied: “Everybody says that she does not look like it. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 30th, 2004
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Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord – once said that a man has been given eyes in the front of his head so that he can look forward, instead of backward. When Napoleon discovered that Talleyrand was betraying him to his enemies, Napoleon told him to his face he was “so much shit in a […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 20th, 2003
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Earlier this year respectable western newspapers told their readers that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was a close neighbour of President Vladimir Putin’s. This bit of geography was a plant from Khodorkovsky’s public relations machine, intended to convince those Americans to whom Khodorkovsky was trying to sell his Yukos shares, that Khodorkovsky and Putin […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 15th, 2003
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It takes times of despotism, when the best and brightest of a country’s elite are obliged to fawn, flatter, and commit crimes to make their fortunes, that a sensitive man discovers that virtues are usually only vices in disguise. At any rate, that’s what La Rochefoucauld – ducal courtier, failed plotter, brilliant aphorist in the […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 20th, 2003
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MOSCOW – When a man runs for the office of Russian prime minister, he must first learn to crawl. Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov mistakenly imagined he was on a high horse, when in early October he received a delegation from United States oil company ExxonMobil and allowed his guests to announce publicly that the […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 18th, 2003
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MOSCOW – Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest tactician in European history. Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to understand how similar Russia’s situation, and his own, are to the circumstances facing France, and to Napoleon, when the country was encircled by hostile powers, led by the British; its treasury emptied by corruption and civil war; its […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 6th, 2003
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The idea of fiscal justice – that taxes should be paid in proportion to the taxpayer’s means -can produce bloody rebellions and even revolutions. But not in Russia. What then-President Boris Yeltsin did in the 1990s was an old trick he might have cribbed from the histories of the old regimes of France if he […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 28th, 2003
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