By John Helmer, Moscow
Emmanuel Macron does not recognize that he has been elected to be the president of a secular state.
France, according to Article One of the French Constitution, is “ a Republic indivisible, secular (laïque), democratic and social.”
Though he often mistakes the same constitutional point, Vladimir Putin made no mistake when he sent his message of condolence to Macron on the catastrophic fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral this week. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
For the second time in as many months President Vladimir Putin has publicly endorsed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to win the Indian national election now under way.
On April 12, in a four-and-a-half-line posting, the Kremlin announced that Modi had been awarded the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called “for outstanding achievements in the development of a particularly privileged strategic partnership between Russia and India and friendly relations between the Russian and Indian peoples.” That day the President also met with the chief executive of Volkswagen, Herbert Diess, which was reported in English. The Kremlin communiqué of the Modi award has not been translated into English.
The announcement went almost unremarked in the Russian press except for Vzglyad, the only independent publication on Russian strategy and security. A report by regular analyst Pyotr Akopov acknowledged “this is the first time that the head of the Indian government was awarded our highest award – none of the Nehru dynasty was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.” The significance of the award to Modi, he added, is not the timing of the Indian elections. “Forecasts mostly agree that Modi will hold power… It is clear that in the choice of 600 million Indian voters, the Russian award for Modi will have almost no impact.”
The Russian significance is personal and strategic. It is recognition by Putin that Modi has stood up to the US threat to sanction India for buying the S-400 missile system. “Despite the fact that Washington continues actively courting Delhi, Narendra Modi is not going to exchange Russia for the United States. Yes, the number of India’s military contracts with the US has increased over the past decade – but Russian-Indian military ties are not disappearing and are becoming more diverse (for example, India bought the S-400).” (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
The case for and against Julian Assange (lead image, 3rd from left) will keep him in the UK for at least eighteen months, probably two years, possibly three, according to leading London lawyers. The UK will have a new government by then; the US too.
In the interval, Assange’s lawyers are preparing to prove the US indictment for conspiracy to commit computer hacking will be superseded by espionage charges. That, they will argue, requires the Westminster Magistrates’ Court to throw the US extradition application out. In addition, their evidence for American political motivation in the prosecution of Assange, and of US violations of the UK and European standards for a fair trial in an independent and impartial court, will be presented. The Chief Magistrate, Emma Arbuthnot, is likely to preside. The hearing is unlikely to start before December of this year.
The more UK and US Government officials take sides in public against Assange and support the allegations in the indictment, the stronger his case will be in court. The announcement by public letter to the Home Secretary last week that seventy-one members of the British parliament oppose Assange’s extradition to the US cuts even more of the ground from under UK prosecutors and the lawyers who will appear in court for the US.
Reversing their campaign to block the Swedish extradition warrant between 2010 and 2012, Assange’s lawyers are also mobilizing to have the Swedish prosecutors return to London with a new warrant, so that this can stretch out the legal wrangling in London for long enough to reach a new British election. If won by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party forms a new government, Assange may benefit from a decision to move Assange’s prosecution to the UK courts, and then to release him.
“The anger for and against this man is extraordinary”, explains a leading London lawyer on extradition cases. “You need very technical lawyering now, and Assange will have to pay for it. But in parallel there will be the PR campaign amplifying the political issue, principally for the Labour Party. The Assange case will stand for every British voter’s idea of what [President Donald] Trump and the Americans are doing to the world. [Chief Magistrate Emma] Arbuthnot is not afraid to make decisions that would be unpopular. But as independent as she is, the pressure on her will be huge not to rule against the US.”
“And so it is for the British court system. Either the courts are bending to the US or to the anti-American movement. It’s going to take a bloody long time and a bloody waste of public money” (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
Russia has grown up; Derk Sauer (lead image), boy scout for American, Dutch and NATO plots for Kremlin regime change since Boris Yeltsin left office, can’t.
Under cover of Russian frontmen, he has bought back the Moscow Times, and put his son Pyotr in charge of opinion. The opinion is the same as it was when Sauer started in Moscow in 1992. Mark Ames, the scourge of Moscow Times duplicity then, says now: “They’re trying to make the MT even more boring than it ever was, with just a hint of standard Moscow liberal politics. Right now Derk seems like a garden gnome I dreamed about long ago.” (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
“Always George’s problem,” John le Carré (lead image, left) has written in his latest resurrection of his best-known MI6 officer, George Smiley (right), “seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.”
“Breathtaking”, claimed an Irish novelist with no government experience, in a London newspaper review. “Gripping”, chimed a BBC journalist whose only official secret was an affair with another journalist he tried to stop other journalists reporting. “An unexpected treat”, blurbed one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper employees. “A nostalgic comparison between espionage then and now”, blurbed another. The Los Angeles Times was religious about le Carré’s theme — “the toll exacted on the individual’s [spy] soul by serving institutions that fail to live up to their professed values will resonate as [readers] consider past and present covert actions of British and US governments.” This is a bite-back for the virulent hatred for the US and its intelligence services le Carré has written into his story, including disclosure of the MI6 document handling code, GUARD, which is so secret the British Government doesn’t mention it in its classification guidelines. It means keep secret from Americans.
David Ignatius, a career-long mouthpiece for the US services at the Washington Post, warns his readers. Le Carré “is at his worst describing characters he doesn’t like (in his recent books, many of the heavy-handed, unconvincing figures are American intelligence officers).”
Since the majority of le Carré’s readers are Americans, le Carré is asking them to pay money and wear themselves out seeing both sides of everything. Only le Carré’s intelligence officers never see the Russian side of anything. What they do see – le Carré makes the point repeatedly in A Legacy of Spies, now in its fifth printing – is the pointlessness of the intelligence they target, and the worthlessness of their methods for going about it. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
Jonathan Haslam, an Englishman employed by Anglo-American universities to report Soviet and Russian political, military and espionage history for the past century until now, suffers from a tic. That’s tic as in fanatic, the adjective Haslam applies to everyone who is a target of his history. But look again: Haslam’s tic turns out to be a symptom of the one-eyed man who believes he’s king (professor) in the kingdom (university) of the blind. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
This week, desperate for attention in New York’s overstocked literary market, a biographer of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife and of the witches of Salem, has reported the one-hundred year anniversary of the departure of the Nabokov family from Crimea in April 1919. “Amid frantic, last-minute negotiations, under a spray of machine-gun fire, Vladimir Nabokov fled Russia 100 years ago this week,” reported Stacy Schiff for the New York Times. “His family had sought refuge from the Bolsheviks in the Crimean peninsula; those forces now made a vicious descent from the north.”
Schiff and her newspaper make a foot fault on that line. “At the time of the evacuation he [Vladimir] had spent 16 quiet months in the Crimea, the last speck of Russia in White hands. Already the Bolsheviks had murdered any number of harmless people.”
If Crimea was Russia then, if only a “speck” and no matter how “vicious” the Bolsheviks from the “north” turned out to be, how on earth could Crimea be otherwise now? (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
The indictment of ex-minister Mikhail Abyzov is a clear signal; the arrest of former Khabarovsk Governor and ex-presidential representative Victor Ishayev is another.
The system of high-level administrative protection, on which these two notoriously corrupt figures have relied for the past twenty years, has ceased protecting them. There is a legion to follow them; they no longer have the telephone number to call for early warning to quash investigations before they close in, or if they do, to escape in time to the US or London.
When Abyzov recognizes he is doomed, he will start to testify against Anatoly Chubais and others. When Alexei Kudrin, chairman of the Accounting Chamber, realizes his game is up, he will start sounding more like the accountant he was in St. Petersburg than the candidate for selection to the highest national office he has aspired to be. Whether Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will be replaced before the next State Duma election falls due in September 2021, or before the election campaign commences, he is going; none of his men will be left in power.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman announced after Abyzov’s arrest: “The President received the report [on the Abyzov case] in advance [of his arrest].” That is precisely what happened, not because Putin gave the order to commence the prosecution of Abyzov, but because Putin wants no one to realize he didn’t. Putin has lost the initiative; he cannot protect those who have counted on his protection for two decades.
By John Helmer, Moscow
In crowded city life, crabs – plural – meant an invasion of lice into warm body parts covered by hair. For readers who are virgins or who have had Brazilian waxing and can’t imagine running into the crabs, the illustration shows the little fellows in the hair of the head. In fact, a case of the crabs usually meant the pubic hair. Rubbing intimately was the way you got the crabs.
Gleb Frank (lead image, left), owner of the Russian Fishery Company, his father Sergei Frank (centre), chief executive of the state shipping company Sovcomflot, and Gennady Timchenko (right), Gleb’s father-in-law, financier of his businesses, and candidate to take over Sovcomflot when it’s privatized, have been rubbing each other intimately. They know where the crabs are and how to catch them. That’s because they are planning to create an oligopoly of the Russian crab industry, and dominate the Russian crab trade with the United States. That is, if the US Government, in defence of its crab fishermen, doesn’t hit the two Franks with the same sanctions as have already been imposed on Timchenko because of Timchenko’s other association; that’s with President Vladimir Putin. He discussed the Frank crab-catching plan in a Kremlin meeting on December 14 last year.
In the newest version of the US sanctions law against Russia, introduced in the US Senate on February 13, Gleb Frank, Sergei Frank and Sovcomflot are potential targets, not only because they are “family members of persons [“political figures, oligarchs, and other persons that facilitate illicit and corrupt activities, directly or indirectly, on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin”] that derive significant benefits from such illicit and corrupt activities”; but also because they are “entities operating in the shipbuilding sector of the Russian Federation.” (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
A Financial Times reporter has just published the claim that a London arbitration tribunal decided last Sunday in favour of Michael Calvey’s claims against Artem Avetisyan and Sherzod Yusupov. Calvey, Avetisyan and Yusupov are Moscow-based shareholders in the merger of Vostochny Bank and Uniastrum Bank. Counting their combined assets, the re-named Vostochny (Orient Express Bank) is the largest of Russia’s regional banks; the 32nd largest bank Russia-wide.
The reporter Max Seddon (lead image, left) is concealing that his information was prompted by Calvey’s (second from right) company and his lawyers in violation of the confidentiality rules of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA). Calvey remains in a Moscow jail, waiting for trial next month on fraud claims by Avetisyan (right) and Yusupov in relation to the Vostochny Bank which Calvey was in the process of selling to Avetisyan until they started to fall out. Seddon and his newspaper have taken Calvey’s side but they have yet to publish the evidence.
The true story of Calvey, his loss-making bank, and his effort to get out of jail with the aid of the London and New York financial press, can be read here. (more…)
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