By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with “Tell me, please, Grandpa,” the little boy asked the Red Army veteran, “what does a war economy mean and how is it different from now?” “Well, Yegorushka,” replied the old man, “our beloved President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin explained just this week: ‘I think commonsense should prevail, after all is said and […]

by Editor - Sunday, April 17th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s a mark of civilized people that they keep and honour their old things.   When the things are broken, they put the pieces back together again. In the 19th century rural Americans of northeast states like Pennsylvania did this with their old tablecloths, dresses, and curtains, turning the remnants into patchwork quilts. […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Now that the US and the NATO allies have taken from the Russian oligarchs their cash in foreign banks, their mansions, their boats and planes, and blocked the export of all private and corporate Russian capital abroad, Russia is freer to decide how to organize the capital investment of the economy. […]

by Editor - Monday, April 11th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The allegation that the Russian leadership in Moscow ordered its soldiers to take a lethal nerve agent called Novichok to England and kill Sergei Skripal began on March 4, 2018, in the offices of the British prime ministry and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).   Skripal himself and his daughter, Yulia […]

by Editor - Friday, April 8th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The public inquiry opened in London on March 17 by Lord Anthony Hughes to investigate  allegations of the Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in July 2018 will employ a secret lawyer to make sure Sergei and Yulia Skripal will not appear; will not answer questions in public; and will not reveal […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 6th, 2022
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By R.K.Raghavan and Ajay Goyal, Mumbai*  @bears_with We now have a first-class international crisis on hand — a man-made crisis of the kind that comes once in millennia and causes empires to fall. We may not, as some observers put it, be witnessing a world war. But we are certainly braving a “war of the world”. […]

by Editor - Tuesday, April 5th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with This is not, repeat not, the tar baby story of the Afro-Americans and American Indians. The US and NATO allies aren’t the fox, Russia isn’t the rabbit, except that the Ukraine is the tar baby.   The reason US commanders were confident Russia would move into the Ukraine when they did […]

by Editor - Sunday, April 3rd, 2022
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By Yevgeny Krutikov, Daria Volkova, and Alyona Zadorozhnaya. Moscow – translated by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Large units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass will be cut into pieces, and then destroyed. Russian troops, as well as units of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), are moving towards each other […]

by Editor - Friday, April 1st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Roman Abramovich (lead image left) is the most indiscreet back-channel, flaunting go-between in the history of secret diplomacy. The Russian oligarch, now a citizen of Israel and Portugal, could not have made himself more visible this week at the Istanbul round of negotiations between Russia and the Ukraine than if he […]

by Editor - Friday, April 1st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In the history of journalism in Moscow, before there were Vladimir Pozner,  Valentin Yumashev,  Derk Sauer,  Alexei Venediktov,  Margarita Simonyan,  and Vladimir Soloviev,  there was Victor Louis. He was the best known of Soviet journalists, and the richest of them by a long shot.     According to a newly published Swiss […]

by Editor - Tuesday, March 29th, 2022
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