By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Until now Russia has never been so silent in the middle of a Middle Eastern war. Russian opinion pollsters are reluctant to reveal how far the country’s public opinion is moving away from Israel towards the Palestinians and the anti-American Arab and Iranian side. The silence from the Kremlin reveals […]

by Editor - Tuesday, October 10th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A US Sixth Fleet squadron (lead image, top left) is now steaming towards the eastern shore of the Mediterraean, following the unusual mission last Thursday by a US Navy P-8 aircraft monitoring the state of operational alert of the Russian naval fleet at Tartous, Syria (top right).* Between August 18 […]

by Editor - Sunday, October 8th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with What’s the truth of how Putin rules Russia?   The longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia has followed Putin since their first meeting in St Petersburg in November 1991. This is the Putin story which has taken more than thirty years to prepare. It’s the story which the western and Russian […]

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
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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 - Thursday, August 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The month of August is also for dead-heading the roses, so there will be fresh blooms before winter. It is the time to charge empty vessels (lead image, rear). Plato was mistaken to claim that empty vessels make the loudest noise; this depends not only on the vessels but on […]

by Editor - Sunday, July 30th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the advertising Hall of Fame, three of the all-time winning slogans are “Just do it”; “Where’s the beef?”; and  “Good to the last drop”.   Three Ukrainian army soldiers and a military press officer from Kiev  have pressed all three on the Financial Times of London, and they just […]

by Editor - Friday, July 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When the Ukrainian and NATO forces have lost their war in eastern Ukraine by Christmas, what will happen to the rump of western Ukraine? The Russian warning, issued last Friday at the Security Council by President Vladimir Putin,  is that the Russian Army will defend western Ukraine, known as Galicia, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, July 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Soldiers lay down smoke on the battlefield to conceal their movements, advancing or retreating, from the troops on the other side. In the US Army manuals for warfighting with smoke, there are four kinds for the battlefield (lead image) – obscuring smoke which is aimed at blinding the enemy so […]

by Editor - Saturday, July 22nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Officially speaking, the Russians ended the year-long Black Sea Grain Initiative by refusing to renew it on July 17. Practically, it has been doomed for weeks.  The Ukrainian attacks on the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline (June 8) and the Taman ship-loading terminal (June 2); Ukrainian efforts to use the grain carriers […]

by Editor - Thursday, July 20th, 2023
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