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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In law courts, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. In politics, too. The problem with what President Vladimir Putin (lead image, right) announced in his Federal Assembly address this week, and what he did immediately after, is that things don’t look the way he says […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In a ruling issued by the Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley (lead image) this week, the  British Government allegations of a Russian assassination plot against Sergei Skripal by the nerve agent Novichok were repeated and accepted — without the qualification that they have not yet been tested and proven in the […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A report by a research unit of the German Bundestag, just released in Berlin, has defied the narrative of the European Union, NATO and the US, with the conclusion that since the Ukraine civil war began in early 2014, there has been no reliable evidence of Russian troop invasion or […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Political fog and the fog of war are different. The first is a way of believing first, seeing afterwards. The second is what happens when the weapons of camouflage and deception  combine with confusion and fear to make seeing clearly impossible. Follow last week’s events as they happened in Damascus, Istanbul […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with “From now onwards you tell the truth, and that’s it”, Robert Fisk, one of the few British journalists who do, explained recently for a television documentary that this was the credo he learned from his job.   He’s still being published in a London newspaper controlled by the Lebedev family; […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with During President Vladimir Putin’s four-and-a-half hour press conference on Thursday – the second longest on record in Russia; the longest in the rest of the world — he was congratulated several times by the audience for the answers he gave about the running of Russia. This is a regular feature. Putin’s […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Simon & Schuster is a New York publisher which is now the property of ViacomCBS,  National Amusements Inc., and the part-demented Sumner Redstone (Rothstein). It has long made a business of selling lies about Russia. That’s the non-fiction department.  It’s a harder sell for the fiction department to do the same. […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Sergei Skripal (lead image), the central figure in the British Government’s 21-month old story of an attempted assassination by GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, is alive; not very well; and living in England.   Skripal has revealed himself in three brief telephone calls to his niece Viktoria, living with his […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In the great game of who will sell gas to Europe, and in the American game of stopping Russia from doing so, Turkey has now declared its stake in the outcome by erecting a paper barrier across the Mediterranean Sea from the Turkish coast to the Libyan coast, and preparing to […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with “We told you so”. In  another case of the Russian General Staff telling the Kremlin that arming the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan puts strategic Russian interests at risk, Turkey has signed a plan to extend its control of the seabed southward across the Mediterranean to the Libyan coastline. The Turkish […]