by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In September of 2018, BBC reporter Mark Urban (lead image, left) ended his book The Skripal Files with a report of the favour MI6 had arranged, so that he could visit Sergei Skripal’s house in Salisbury, and report that a souvenir of British country life which MI6 agent Pablo Miller had […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 19th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In a ruling issued by the Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley (lead image) this week, the  British Government allegations of a Russian assassination plot against Sergei Skripal by the nerve agent Novichok were repeated and accepted — without the qualification that they have not yet been tested and proven in the […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 15th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Sergei Skripal (lead image), the central figure in the British Government’s 21-month old story of an attempted assassination by GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, is alive; not very well; and living in England.   Skripal has revealed himself in three brief telephone calls to his niece Viktoria, living with his […]

by Editor - Tuesday, December 17th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with English plane spotters and bird watchers have discovered the location of the Skripals in Gloucestershire. An hour and a half’s drive north of their well-known home in Salisbury, Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been hidden inside an airbase operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) for long-range B-52 and B-2 […]

by Editor - Sunday, December 8th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A British Ministry of Defence document, issued on March 12 but unnoticed since then, reports  the ministry has searched its files and records of the blood sampling and testing for Novichok in the blood of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, but “failed to locate any information that provides the exact time that […]

by Editor - Thursday, December 5th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Slaughtering sheep, goats and chickens with the idea of checking their innards to tell the fortunes of human beings started with the ancient Babylonians, peaked in ancient Rome, and despite the best efforts of the Catholic popes, it was still going strong in medieval England. The killing was called casting the […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 24th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Under threat of formal investigation for breaking the law and lying to the press, David Ridley (lead image), the English county coroner in charge of investigating the alleged Novichok poisoning death of Dawn Sturgess, has announced a new inquest hearing. This week through the coroner’s office in Salisbury, a new […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 6th, 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 The British Government’s narrative that a Kremlin-ordered assassination plot against a former GRU agent, Sergei Skripal, in March of 2018 also caused the death of a woman, Dawn Sturgess,  three months later,  has collapsed for lack of evidence admissible in court.   After nineteen months of investigations by hundreds of […]

by Editor - Monday, October 14th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Robert Service (lead images) commits the pathetic fallacy over and over. It isn’t that his fallacies are pathetic, and so deserve to be pitied. It is that Service takes money for writing histories, purporting to be about Russia, its revolutionary leaders, and now its current leader, by projecting his own […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 3rd, 2019
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