by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with There is no lack of confidence in Donetsk that the war will be won, but no conviction when exactly that will be. A Ukrainian heavy artillery salvo hit the Kirovsky district market, on the western outskirts of  Donetsk city on Sunday,  killing at least 27 people, and wounding about as many. […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with By Russian oligarch standards, Vladimir Lisin (lead image) – iron-ore and coalminer, steelmaker, land and sea transporter, shipbuilder — is the only honest one. In the acquisition, enlargement,  and protection of his asset holdings over thirty years, he has also managed to defeat the dishonest ones, starting with Oleg Deripaska,  then […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 21st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When President Vladimir Putin wrote a condolence on the death of Henry Kissinger (lead image), according to the Kremlin communiqué, the president said things in private to Kissinger’s widow which he left unreported to the Russian press.    The Kremlin communiqué says: “Condolences over the passing of Henry Kissinger. Vladimir Putin […]

by Editor - Saturday, December 2nd, 2023
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It was the US strategy for dismembering the Soviet Union, and then destroying the surviving Russian part, to install individual politicians and formations of economic assets controlled by Washington. The first chosen was Boris Yeltsin; then his prime minister Yegor Gaidar and chief of staff Anatoly Chubais; and then the oligarchs […]

by Editor - Tuesday, November 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Belgium has decided to host its second Battle of Waterloo in two hundred and eight years, this time on Napoleon’s side. But on this occasion it won’t be, as the Duke of Wellington claimed before, a “close run thing”. In the last episode  of the Napoleon-sized mistakes the US and […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It must be the sea air at Vladivostok that causes temporary clumsiness and misspeaking on the part of President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) during the carefully orchestrated question-and-answer session of the annual Far Eastern Economic Forum. At the forum in September 2018, asked about British government and media reports […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 2023
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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 On March 5, in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), there was a fire-bombing of a French–owned brewery which destroyed 50,000 bottles of beer. On August 23, a private jet of the Wagner Group was bombed in the air north of Moscow, and the Wagner leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the history of the privatization of Russia’s industrial polluters no oligarch has been dirtier, penalized more often,  and avoided court and state regulators more regularly than the steel, coke and coal producer, Igor Zyuzin. No one has more faithfully and profitably lobbied for Zyuzin’s benefit in parliament and government […]

by Editor - Thursday, April 20th, 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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