By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with To understand President Vladimir Putin’s recent public statements on the Russian economy, the Tuapse refinery fire, and security controls for the internet, the question is – does he believe what all Russians know to be obviously misstated and mistaken? Does Putin understand he is discrediting himself with Russian voters as the […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 29th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with There is a 2,500-year old message about who is strong, who is weak in politics and war, and what the latter can do to defend themselves from the former. The message comes from Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Written between five and ten years after the events described, […]

by Editor - Tuesday, April 28th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with April 25, ANZAC Day, is a national celebration in Australia commemorating the World War 1 campaign, ordered by Winston Churchill in London, for Australian and New Zealand (NZ) forces to land at Gallipoli, and attempt to march on the Ottoman Empire capital at Istanbul.   It has become the equivalent of […]

by Editor - Saturday, April 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The combination of personal sanctions and asset seizures against the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (lead image),  corporate sanctions against his Rusal and EN+ companies, and the cutoff of alumina feedstock supplies from Australia and the Ukraine have done visible damage to Rusal’s Hong Kong-listed share price (lead image).      At the […]

by Editor - Friday, April 24th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In the Stone Ages, as President Donald Trump (lead image) calls ancient history, it was expected that if a man wanted somebody enough, he would grab them by the short hairs to make them scream their compliance. The Stone Age painters’ records on cave walls,  which have been discovered to date, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Testimony from the survivors of the Iranian frigate, IRIS Dena, attacked and sunk in a US Navy operation, led by the submarine USS Charlotte on March 4, has just been released in Iran,  broadcast by an Iranian television outlet (lead images, top and bottom, are screenshots, bottom image is a file photo). […]

by Editor - Tuesday, April 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When journalism reports decision-making and action-taking in Teheran, Beijing, Moscow,  and Washington —  one after another in time sequence —  the differences, the corrections, the contradictions, and  the ambiguities of meaning between them are bound to be confusing to observers reading the record of outcomes without inside knowledge.   Confusion, however, […]

by Editor - Monday, April 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with This is not a question. Asking it is the answer.This is because the Security Council, the politburo of Russian war and security policymaking which President Vladimir Putin leads but does not fully control, rarely issues public statements; it never issues one like the announcement of April 14.

by Editor - Sunday, April 19th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For our audience, which is exposed every few minutes of the day to the knowns, speculation about the known facts, speculation about the knowns, and the hopefulness, wishfulness,  and theories of what’s about to happen, that’s an impossible amount of data and information to make sense of things. Let’s try an […]

by Editor - Friday, April 17th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In successive tweets on Wednesday afternoon (April 15), President Donald Trump posted a new picture himself as the embodiment of God the Son on earth (lead image, left).  Forty-four  minutes earlier, he had announced that “President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there [China] in a few weeks.”    […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 15th, 2026
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