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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with “Don’t you ever let me hear this again, or I’ll lose my temper.” That was Lucky Luciano’s (lead image, left) ultimatum to Vito Genovese (right) in 1946 when Luciano was in Havana, Cuba,  organizing his business comeback in the US, as Genovese tried persuading him to delegate the operations to himself. “Right […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the very first Pentagon press briefing of the Trump Administration, held this past Tuesday, Air Force Lieutenant General Alexus Grynkewich, who directs US military operations on the Ukraine battlefield and in Yemen, announced:  “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,  they understand that when America gets involved in a fight, it’s our […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with At the beginning of this month, Bild, the German media sensationalist, claimed to have discovered “incredible developments between [Presidents] Trump and Putin. And they affect Germany! Bild research reveals secret talks between the US and Russia in Switzerland. It’s about an explosive gas deal for Germany! At the centre of the affair: once […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with President Vladimir Putin has solved the problem of how to conduct telephone calls with Donald Trump’s personality cult. Following Trump’s tweeted claim in the early morning of Tuesday that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to”  the telephone call which took place over two hours  of the early […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with NATO infantry operations veteran Major (retd) Mark Takacs (lead image) has published an  animated map analysis of the battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces around Sudzha, in the Kursk region, between March 5 and 14. Nothing comparable has been reported by the Russian military bloggers; their US copyists; or the Ukrainian and […]

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by Jean-Marc Bovy, Geneva  @bears_with Do you remember Sergei Skripal, that double agent poisoned in Great Britain, they said, by the Russian secret services? What has become of them, Sergei and his daughter Yulia, since they survived one of the most violent poisons that there are?  Why don’t we see them any longer? And there are other troublesome questions which only a great adventurer of investigating in troubled waters could tackle.

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In this discussion on Thursday morning, Chennai time, two leading Indian military analysts, Lieutenant General (retd) Ravi Shankar and Brigadier (retd) Arun Saghal,  explain that the 30-day ceasefire which the Americans and British have proposed for the Ukraine battlefield should follow as one of the outcomes of the  end-of-war negotiations, and not […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with  “As for the situation in Syria,”, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin announced on Monday, “violence is taking place there, which cannot but cause our deep concern. This concern is shared in many countries of the world, in international organizations, including the United Nations.”  On Tuesday, he added that “Russia supports […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with There are four outcomes to beware in this game for players, and for kibitzers also. The first is the Observer Effect. This is when the observer gets so close to the target, the target itself is rattled, loses visibility, acts unpredictably. Second is the Confusion Effect when the observer can’t tell […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Last week I asked Lieutenant General (retired) P.R. Shankar to analyse India’s victorious war against Pakistan which in fourteen days, December 3-16, 1971, ended in the capitulation of the Pakistan Army and the creation of the new state of Bangladesh; and compare that with Russia’s Special Military Operation (SVO) against the […]