By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré) died after a bathroom fall last December, the current chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), Richard Moore, announced by tweet that Cornwell had been “a giant of literature who left his mark on MI6 through his evocative and brilliant novels”.  By mark, […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 7th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with This is the story of how Vladimir Putin changed his mind on who should own Russia’s most important asset sailing the seven seas. Or did he really? This is also the story of the privatisation of Sovcomflot, the state-owned shipping company and one of the largest fleets of oil and gas […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russia bunker-buster information bomb, Catherine Belton’s (lead image) Putin’s People, proved to be a dud at a London ceremony last week.  In its award for the best non-fiction book about Russia for 2020, Pushkin House announced the winner was a retiring Oxford don whose “long and distinguished career” had displayed […]

by Editor - Monday, November 1st, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russian intelligentsia, their hangers-on, oligarchs, and Navalnyites have always suffered from a cultural cringe. The grass is greener on the other side of the Russian border, they think, and for obvious reasons – though they aren’t the same for each of the cringing elites.   So when the political tide […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
No Comments »

By Stanislas Balcerac, Warsaw, and John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When Radosław Sikorski was a Polish government minister, he was obliged to make an annual report to the parliament (Sejm) and a public record of his income and assets. For Polish  voters to learn whether his wife was being rewarded for influencing her husband in his official […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When the German Army invaded Europe in the 1940s, they applied the doctrine of collective guilt against the civilian populations behind the Resistance and the partisans attacking their troops. After the Germans were defeated, the doctrine and the murderous result of it were judged to be a war crime. The London […]

by Editor - Tuesday, October 26th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, the most famous English portraitist of the 18th century, have almost nothing to do with Russia at war today. Almost, but not quite nothing.

by Editor - Monday, October 25th, 2021
No Comments »

By Marios Evriviades, Cyprus, translated from Greek by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with From time to time we read that Russia will recognize the separatist faits accomplis of Turkey’s occupation in Cyprus, in exchange for Turkey’s recognition of the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation. And each time the Russian government categorically refutes the existence of such […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Computer programmes used in universities to detect student plagiarism, along with semantic, style, and cognitive tests, reveal that Putin’s People, a book published by HarperCollins and bylined Catherine Belton, has another author or authors. Comparison testing of the vocabulary of Belton’s book and of transcripts of podcasts when Belton has been […]

by Editor - Tuesday, October 19th, 2021
No Comments »

Translated and introduced by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In official testimony to the European Parliament last week, the European Union Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson, attacked Russia for “exacerbating the tight [supply] balance” and thus causing “the rising prices”. Responding to allegations against Gazprom, Simson promised an investigation. “We are looking into this claim, through our […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 14th, 2021
No Comments »