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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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with On the battlefield the Ukraine has pioneered the Mosquito Tactic – that’s sending units of dozens of soldiers running towards Russian defence fortifications in several swarms at the same time, across a half-dozen salients up and down the line of contact. In parallel, in the air and on the sea […]

by Editor - Tuesday, July 18th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with For all its public talk, NATO has agreed on a secret six-month plan for Ukraine. It’s a case of do or die by December. Either the Ukrainian forces, firing everything the NATO allies can give them — from US cluster munitions to Franco-English Storm Shadow missiles and German Leopard tanks […]

by Editor - Tuesday, July 11th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The calls have begun in Moscow, starting among the war blogs and battlefield reporters, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater […]

by Editor - Wednesday, July 5th, 2023
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