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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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Igor Zyuzin (lead image), owner of the Mechel steel and coal group, and one of the few Russian metals oligarchs not presently sanctioned  by the US, is a running sore on the Kremlin’s policy of halting,  and also continuing,  industrial pollution. From his base in Chelyabinsk, and at factories, mines, […]

by Editor - Tuesday, March 14th, 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 brainwashing of the peoples of the NATO alliance is working much better with the British than the Americans. For the time being, Russia-hating is a peculiarly English phenomenon. Almost half the Americans polled a month ago said they did not believe Russia was an adversary with whom the US is […]

by Editor - Sunday, February 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Paper tiger German tanks, delivered on the insistence of lame-duck Ukrainian politicians, will become sitting ducks on the battlefield, while the economic front of the war against Russia is looking more and more like the story of over-confidence and guile as told by Uncle Remus to generations of American children. That’s […]

by Editor - Wednesday, February 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with As democracy goes in states at war, in Russia  there is more of it —  faction fighting, public criticism,  media debate — about battlefield operations, wins and losses, than there is on the NATO side, in the US, Canada, Germany, France or England. By contrast, on the conduct of domestic economic […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 18th, 2023
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