By Gary Busch, London*   @bears_with The roots of the Syrian Civil War start with conflicts over who controls Syria’s energy supplies. The war continues, especially in the Kurdish areas of the north, in a fight over water which has been growing desperately scarcer for everybody – Syrians, Kurds, Turks, Iraqis. Achieving a final conclusion to […]

by Editor - Monday, October 21st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hoping that his meeting with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for next Tuesday in Sochi, will give him the same battlefield advantages on Syrian territory which Putin conceded in their Idlib Agreement of last September. By fixing the Putin negotiation at the limit of the […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 17th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union is John Heathershaw’s métier. Heathershaw is a professor at the University of Exeter where he specializes in studying and teaching “conflict, security and development in authoritarian political environments, especially in post-Soviet Central Asia.”  Recently, he took exception to my critical reviews of books on […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 16th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Boris Dubrovsky (lead images), President Vladimir Putin’s governor of Chelyabinsk between 2014 and March 19, 2019, has long been at risk of lung disease, and he is now reported to be in a Swiss clinic for treatment. His prognosis is uncertain. More certain it is that Dubrovsky will not be […]

by Editor - Tuesday, October 15th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Dominic Cummings, presently a powerful and wealthy 47-year old special advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was hard at work in Moscow and Samara for three years, between 1994 and 1997. He has acknowledged himself that “I worked in Russia 1994-7 on various projects.” This was no news to […]

by Editor - Monday, October 14th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Among Russian oligarchs, Alexei Mordashov (lead image, centre) holds two records. One is for empty promises: he has never told the whole truth in public or when he has visited President Vladimir Putin (right) for private conversations about his business plans and the Russian state interest. Mordashov’s other record is […]

by Editor - Monday, September 23rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Whoaaa Neddy! Another hack has gotten out of the stable of American exceptionalist historians of Russia. Actually, this one, Eleonory Gilburd, is a Russian-born, US educated and employed hack of the Soviet Jewish emigration like Keith Gessen, Masha Gessen  and Yury Slezkine. Russian exiles with axes to grind.    They […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 22nd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It was Aristophanes who said you can’t teach a crab to walk straight. Lenin wasn’t talking about crabs when he recommended taking one step forward, two steps back. This summer, when President Vladimir Putin last talked to Gennady Timchenko about his family’s crab business, he said he was revising the […]

by Editor - Monday, September 16th, 2019
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  By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with On Friday afternoon in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for three hours, and then publicly endorsed him for re-election. Putin’s endorsement was unconditional: he could have warned against Netanyahu’s election pledge, revealed last week, to annex the West Bank of Palestine, but he […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 15th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In high state politics there’s a difference between the morons and the psychopaths – between Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau on the one hand, John Bolton and Chrystia Freeland on the other. The  difference is in the ability to count the fingers on one hand.  Bolton has been removed because, […]

by Editor - Friday, September 13th, 2019
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