by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Wine, and the money to spend on drinking it, are growing at an unprecedented pace in Russia. For a country at war in Europe this has not happened in modern times, and probably not since the ancient Roman emperors and medieval English kings arranged for their city fountains to flow with […]

by Editor - Thursday, June 13th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It was the English writer G.K. Chesterton who remarked that “compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.” In the current war against Russian grain, less than half […]

by Editor - Monday, June 3rd, 2024
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 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 The longest lasting of the false-flag operations conducted against Russia since the Special Military Operation started in February 2022 has been flying the flag of the United Nations (UN). The chief flag-bearer has been the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese (lead image, left); he has manipulated, plotted, […]

by Editor - Monday, June 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The war and US war sanctions have reversed the destruction of the Russian farm economy forced during the 1990s by the US “reformers” in the Yeltsin administration led by the recently exiled Anatoly Chubais.   Now, however, under government orders for self-sufficiency in food production, protection from US biochemical warfare […]

by Editor - Tuesday, April 25th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with There’s one way of winning a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible;  and another way of losing a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible. The first way is to stock up on champagne, as they are doing in Moscow. The […]

by Editor - Sunday, April 16th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Everyone who has ever heard rice go snap, crackle, and pop! knows that eating the grain is good for your energy. At the front, Russian soldiers are eating more rice, on per capita average, than any other soldier in Europe, twice as much as the Ukrainian troops. And the rice the […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Football is the most popular sport Russians like to play and like to watch. Ice hockey comes second. The connexion between football and ice hockey, apples and tomatoes is that Gennady Timchenko (lead image left) is the sanctioned oligarch who is now moving into domestic production of apples to substitute for […]

by Editor - Monday, February 27th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Massachusetts philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was making a mistake when he claimed “there are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.”  Although he grew pears himself, Emerson isn’t known to have made them into pear cider, also known as poiré in France, perry […]

by Editor - Wednesday, February 8th, 2023
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