By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The editor-in-chief of The Sunday Guardian, Joyeeta Basu, asks the questions which the BRICS summit meetings over the weekend will answer in a consensus communiqué; in photo displays of smiles and handholding;  and in bilateral meetings whose substance will be a combination of smokescreen and confidences to defend against Private Enemy […]

by Editor - Thursday, September 10th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The men of the Russian military forces doing the fighting on the Ukraine front are defending far more unequally distributed Russian national income and asset wealth on the home front than the Red Army which fought and won the war against Germany and Japan, the Great Patriotic War of 1939-45. Moreover, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In his late afternoon, Tuesday, telephone call with President Donald Trump (lead image, right), President Vladimir Putin has followed the old Theodore Roosevelt (left) line. But he stopped short of agreeing to a summit meeting with Trump and Vladimir Zelensky in Delhi this coming weekend. Kirill Dmitriev disguises the failure with […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 8th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Photographs published in the German media, then republished in the press of the NATO allies, of an explosive device allegedly planted by Russian agents at Leipzig airport last month “do not correspond to what airport employees initially saw at the scene…the drone itself was a small, inexpensive consumer device intended primarily […]

by Editor - Monday, September 7th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When it comes to truth-telling at the standard of traditional investigative journalism, podcasting and podcasters don’t — not by a long chalk. That’s an expression which appeared in British pubs long ago when darts players kept score by scratching it in chalk on an old slate tile. A long chalk was […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 6th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When an enemy sworn to destroy Russia comes to the Kremlin for talks, the record of what exactly was said can remain secret for so long that whatever calculations and interpretations were made at the time – by the enemy and by the Russian side – are no longer remembered and […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 6th, 2026
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot […]

by Editor - Tuesday, August 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Every year at this time, as certain and regular as the Moscow city administration turns off the central hotwater boilers for cleaning, we close the office, postpone the flow of Dances with Bears, suspend the tweets. But just as surely as Muscovites install electric water heaters for substitutes during the profilaktika (профилактика […]

by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow, with Sahar Dadjoo, Teheran  @bears_with In an interview and video recorded in Teheran on Wednesday, Sahar Dadjoo asked the questions and these are the answers published on August 1.    In focus is the US-guided Ukrainian drone attack on the Iranian cargo vessel Ana in the Caspian Sea which occurred on July 25. […]

by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By Oleg Tsarev, Crimea, introduced by John Helmer  @bears_with The current restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration and NATO on Ukrainian drone and missile strike options against Russia reflect a strategy known as boiling the frog in warm water. This is a strategy of gradual escalation, the timing of which is measured stepwise – so western […]

by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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