Over growing protests from Iran, Russia has decided to draw a fine line in the Caspian Sea to enable oil companies to drill, but avoid the legal problems of setting up national sectors in the sea. The Russian strategy is also to settle the status of the northern Caspian oilfields without antagonizing Iran, by pressuring […]

by John Helmer - Friday, May 24th, 2002
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The haste with which President George Bush announced this week’s arms control treaty with Russia -minutes after negotiators for the two sides claimed to have been working on the text, and days before they had finished work on the side document on missile defense – must have been embarrassing for President Vladimir Putin, The disclosure […]

by John Helmer - Friday, May 17th, 2002
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MOSCOW – Had Adolf Hitler won his war against Russia, he had a market and land reform plan that should ring a bell. That’s because the policies that have come closest to the targets Hitler envisaged have been implemented by well-known officials of the Boris Yeltsin administration, many of whom still occupy high posts in […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, April 20th, 2002
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By John Helmer The newsletter from the US Embassy warned recently that middle-aged American males should be on the lookout for a dangerous thief in Moscow who puts them to sleep before he or she steals their wallets, and any other property that can be carried off. At the start of the last century in […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 29th, 2002
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President Vladimir Putin has surprised the Russian banking community, and global emerging market analysts, by dismissing the Central Bank chief Victor Gerashchenko, and replacing him with a man, who despite a decade of holding senior finance policy posts in Moscow, is totally unknown to have opinions of his own. Sergei Ignatiev, 54, currently deputy finance […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 20th, 2002
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By John Helmer The only foreign-language sentence that managed to lodge itself correctly in the brain of Ronald Reagan, before he developed Alzheimer’s Disease but after he became President of the United States, was “doveryai no proveryai”. As he never tired of explaining, that is Russian for “trust but verify.” Reagan and his successors always […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 15th, 2002
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When a tree falls in the forest, everywhere in the world the same thing happens. It makes a loud noise; it drops to the right or left; it crushes the life below unpredictably. But when a Russian bank crashes, it comes down in a way that’s unique – less like a doomed tree, more like […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, March 3rd, 2002
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There’s an old saying – not everyone with a knife is a cook. Take the EU trade commissioners, for example, and the European Commission’s Directorate-General III (Industry). For years, these appointees of every European manufacturing interest, large and small, have hectored audiences in Moscow about the desirability of reform in the Russian steel industry. They […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 25th, 2002
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A Moscow investment bank recently concluded that President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has become so solid, “almost no imaginable political development can significantly affect it.” That’s quite a leap of imagination for a banker but, as the assessment is widely held in both domestic and foreign circles, it’s worth taking a closer look at the evidence […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 25th, 2002
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The ancient wit of Aesop was born out of misfortune and is especially sharp on the subject of people getting their just desserts. You see, Aesop was unlucky enough to have been captured in war and sold into slavery as a personal secretary for his owners. In Aesop’s fable about the middle-aged man and his […]

by John Helmer - Friday, February 1st, 2002
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