by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Two weeks is not a long time in Russian politics. But it’s just enough for Kremlin deputy staff chief Sergei Kirienko to send the instruction to the Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova (lead image) that any turnout, big or small, for the national vote on constitutional amendments will be enough.  The 50% turnout required for the validation of the constitutional referendum in December 1993 has been abandoned.

Pamfilova announced in Moscow yesterday: “The individual who considers himself an active citizen, the one who believes that his opinion can and should influence certain decisions, takes part. Knowing our realities, the obligation to vote [Обязаловка] always gives the opposite result.” This is the strongest indication yet that the Kremlin is afraid that the national turnout for the vote, now confirmed for April 22, will be less than 50%.

by Editor - Thursday, February 27th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The ongoing release of secret information about nerve agent manufacture and testing at Porton Down, the British Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), indicates that monkeys were used as targets for several years before Sergei and Yulia Skripal suffered poisoning in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.

The British kill dose and death speed experiments on the monkeys were paid for by the US Defence Department.  

Publication of the experiment details and the number of monkeys and other animals tested show that the Anglo-American nerve agent weapon programme was under way for several years before the Skripal case began, and has continued since then. This gives the lie to the 2018  declaration to parliament by then-Prime Minister Theresa May that “only Russia had the technical means, operational experience and motive to carry out the attack”. 

That was a special kind of deceit.  May knew that what she intended the House of Commons and everyone outside to believe wasn’t the whole truth. May’s phrase “only Russia” was false, because the rest of the truth was that the UK and US also had the technical means, operational experience and motive to manufacture and test organophosphate weapons like Novichok. This truth May intended to dissemble. 

The top-secret nerve agent programme at DSTL, or Porton Down as it is also known for short, has not been fully disclosed to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); it violates Article II of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC);  concealment from other, non-allied states, is a violation of Article IX of the Convention.

If suspected by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, the Porton Down operations with Novichok would have been an obvious target for espionage for years before the Skripal attack, and reason thereby for the circulation of GRU agents in the Salisbury area.  If British counter-intelligence suspected that Sergei Skripal might try to pass Porton Down’s Novichok secrets to GRU, and been caught red-handed two years ago, the meaning of next month’s anniversary of the Salisbury incident changes more than a little.   

by Editor - Wednesday, February 26th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There was a new release of documents by Bonanza Media, Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova on Monday morning. They add to the evidence released last week from the files of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) prosecuting the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 on July 17, 2014.

Two secret reports by Major General Onno Eichelsheim, head of Dutch military intelligence (MIVD), have been disclosed in their Dutch origanals. The first told Dutch prosecutors that the MIVD relied on intelligence obtained from “partner informatie” – partner intelligence — to conclude no Russian BUK missile radar and launch units had crossed the border into Ukraine before or on July 17, 2014; no BUK missile radar targeting or firing on MH17 had been detected; and no identified Russian units on the Russian side of the border had launched missiles.

In his reporting Eichelsheim told the prosecutors his intelligence came from “reliable sources and analyses of all locations”. The prosecutors understood Eichelsheim to be referring to US satellite and airborne electronic surveillance and NATO and British signals monitoring. Despite statements from Washington officials in the aftermath of the shootdown that they had seen US satellite data, and statements from Dutch officials claiming to have been briefed on these data, none has been documented until the Eichelsheim disclosures from the JIT files. Eichelsheim reveals that US intelligence means the opposite of what US officials have told their allies to insist upon.  

A second letter report by Eichelsheim was revealed by Bonanza Media today. Dated September 21, 2016 – the same date as the first report – Eichelsheim identified the same “partner” intelligence – US, NATO and British – for the details of a BUK missile radar and launcher unit detected in the Donetsk area on the day of the shootdown.

Referring to photographs of this unit which had been published on the internet by Ukrainian and NATO propaganda sources, Eichelsheim explicitly denied the BUK  was capable of being fired. “Based on the available information,” Eichelsheim discreetly identified his US and NATO sources. He concluded: “On the internet, there are additional photos (annexes 1 and 2) showing a 9A310M1 radar and launch vehicle of which the electronics section located in the rear of the unit has been completely destroyed.”

This military report flatly contradicts the core allegation in the JIT press statements and the Dutch prosecutors’ indictment charging four men – three Russians, one Ukrainian fighting on the Novorussian side —  with culpable homicide in the downing of MH17. They are scheduled to go on trial, in their absence, next month. According to van der Werff and Yerlashova, Eichelseheim’s agency will neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the two reports.

by Editor - Monday, February 24th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian and Syrian general staffs and their men have been doing to the Turks what no one has achieved in the Middle East since 1917.

So the Sultan has called the Tsar – three times this month so far; in January, once by telephone, twice in face-to-face meetings; and twice by telephone in December. Every time the telephone rings, it is, as the Kremlin communiqué doesn’t fail to mention, “at the Turkish side’s initiative.”

On the battlefields of northwest Syria, the initiative at the start of each day has been the Turkish side’s, too. But at the end of the day the Russians have inflicted defeat. Not often in five hundred years of communications between the Porte and the Kremlin, has the subliminal message been so clear.     There is another subliminal message from the Kremlin. “We,” Dmitry Peskov, the Turkish-speaking spokesman for the Russian President, said on Wednesday. “used to be satisfied with the agreements reached in Sochi more than a year ago and this satisfaction was mutual. However, we are completely dissatisfied now that militants and terrorists have begun advancing from Idlib and attacking Syrian forces and Russian military installations.” This is a signal from the Moscow lobby for the Turks that it too is in retreat — from the Russian Defence Ministry and the General Staff.

by Editor - Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the picture you see ought to be preposterous.   

A Russian assassin employed by the military intelligence agency GRU is pointing a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume filled with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok at a man turning the handle of his front-door. The man is Sergei Skripal, a GRU officer himself, who turned double agent for the British; was caught and imprisoned by the Russians; then swapped into a second retirement in Salisbury, in the middle of England, paid for by the British intelligence service, MI6. From the handle to the man’s hand, through his skin, the poison should cause the man’s lungs to seize up in as many seconds as it takes you to look at the picture and judge if the potted bush beside the front-door is a genuine English boxwoood or a plastic one. The man’s heart will then stop, and he’ll be dead. There will be froth from his mouth on the linoleum, and other bodily stains too. Job done, the man in the mask will step clear and bolt out the door. He doesn’t have a getaway car; he’ll be making on foot for the railway station.  But he won’t go direct. He will take a detour to find a place in which to dismantle his weapon, returning the bottle, the atomiser and applicator tube to its Nina Ricci box and wrapper, then toss the lot in a rubbish bin.  

But what if the only genuine thing in the picture is the jagged lightning in the sky? What if the picture is a cartoon of what happened to Skripal on March 4, 2018? Skripal himself would know, but he isn’t allowed by the British authorities to say. That’s the giveaway this picture is a fake. You suspected as much from the start, didn’t you? But if the British Prime Minister, the House of Commons, MI6, the state broadcaster BBC, and everybody else in authority in England insists the cartoon is the truth, who are you to think otherwise, or me to suggest the picture is laughable? Read the book – then try laughing at everybody in authority in England.

by Editor - Thursday, February 20th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

New evidence leaked last week from the files of the  Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) proves that Dutch state prosecutors  have concealed and suppressed evidence of a direct witness of the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine on July 14, 2014.

That witness, a Ukrainian villager under MH17’s flight path, reported to a Dutch police investigator in July 2015 that he had seen two Ukrainian Air Force fighter jets in the air at the time of the shootdown; a plume moving horizontally across the sky, indicating an air-to-air missile launch, not a missile fired from the ground; and the subsequent fall of the MH17 itself.  

Another of the documents leaked shows that Dutch prosecutors have concealed an official report by Major-General Onno Eichelsheim, director of the Dutch military intelligence service (MIVD). Addressed to the National Prosecutor’s Office for Counter-Terrorism, and dated September 21, 2016, Eichelsheim said that “flight MH17 was flying beyond the range of all identified and operational Ukrainian and Russian locations where 9K37M1 Buk M1 systems were deployed.”

A third piece of evidence, hidden until now, is a report by the Australian Federal Police to the JIT dated July 2015. This concludes that images published internationally of a Russian BUK missile carrier alleged to have been the weapon used against MH17 had been “manipulated” and almost certainly had not been recorded at the time of the MH17 incident. The newly discovered evidence is inconclusive on what or who caused the downing of MH17. But the leaked documents show that the Dutch court trial, scheduled to start in The Hague on March 9 is a sham, its evidence inadmissible in a criminal proceeding in the UK or the US.  

by Editor - Wednesday, February 19th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Despite an order from President Vladimir Putin to arrange a nationwide vote on his proposed amendments to the Russian Constitution, the Central Election Commission and its director Ella Pamfilova are unable to confirm the contents of the ballot paper, the counting rule for voter approval or disapproval, the threshold of voter turnout for the vote to be valid, or even the date of the vote itself.

“This is a true plebiscite”, Putin told a meeting of the Kremlin-appointed working group on the constitutional amendments last week.   “Citizens of the Russian Federation should record their authorship of the law. It will be as the people say. If the people reaffirm during the vote that they support the law, it will enter in force and amendments will be made to the Constitution. If they do not confirm their support for the law, there will be no amendments to the Constitution.”

A press release, issued the next day by the Commission, claimed that “on February 14, 2020, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed an order to prepare for the all-Russian vote on the approval of changes to the Constitution of the Russian Federation”. The text of the three-page order combines the obvious with the superfluous;  it omits the important altogether. 

Paragraph 1 says: “State authorities, local self-government bodies, and other state bodies and organizations should prepare for the all-Russian vote on approving amendments to the Constitution”.  Nowhere in the six paragraphs which follow does the President make clear what an “all-Russian vote” shall be or do.  Para.2 says the CEC should be in charge of “introduction, operation and development of automation tools, legal training of voters, professional training of members of election commissions and other organizers of elections, referendums, and publication of the necessary printed materials”. Government officials at all levels “should assist election commissions in preparing for the all-Russian vote, as well as in providing logistical support for its preparation”, according to Para. 3. The remaining paragraphs set out how state budget money should be transferred, banked, and disbursed for the CEC’s expenses.

When officials were asked to clarify the rules of the “all-Russian vote” for valid turnout, voter approval or disapproval, and the law regulating this “all-Russian vote”, as distinct from a constitutional referendum, spokesmen for Pamfilova at the CEC and for Sergei Kirienko, the deputy chief of the president’s staff in charge of the vote, refused to say. “We will answer when we are ready,” a CEC official said. Her telephone is no longer being answered. The Commission is unready because Kirienko has been unable to finalize Kremlin agreement on the instructions. In the meantime, the Kremlin has also ordered the State Duma to delay its second-reading debate on the proposed constitutional amendment law for another month. In his February 14 order Putin omitted fixing the date of the national vote for April 22, which had been reported days earlier. That day, the Kremlin did not realize, is the 150^th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth.

by Editor - Monday, February 17th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It is exactly two years since the case of two Russians, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, began with their collapse on a park bench in the middle of England on the afternoon of March 4, 2018.

On their anniversary it is necessary to tell this story. But it isn’t the story of what happened. This is because the only people who can tell that one, the Skripals, are locked away in isolation, guarded by determined men under secret government orders.

Instead, this is the story of what didn’t happen – provably didn’t happen because it was quite impossible circumstantially; and because the legal papers warranting that it did have not been signed by a judge, tested in a court of law, or released in public.

The facts which you have seen, heard or read about the incident of March 4, 2018, have been falsified. Everything that has flowed from them is false too.  Understanding this is a start to the other story, and so something solid to work from – not missed until now; more like seen but disbelieved. As if the truth were fiction, and the fiction truth.

This is the story of how the largest and longest criminal investigation in modern British history ended in a prosecution without evidence of the crime, the weapon, the crime scene, and even of the crime victims. Allegations there are; evidence admissible in a British court of law there is not. That’s to say, a prosecution which will not be presented in court, before no judge and jury; with no witnesses on oath; and no verdict. That is no prosecution at all.

To say otherwise, as do the British Government, its allies abroad, and every one of its mass circulation media without exception, is a lie. The victims, it turns out, are held in a British prison, at a secret location, incommunicado, without access to lawyers to defend them, without contact with their families, or the consular representatives of the state whose passports they hold. No court has judged them or sentenced them to this punishment.

by Editor - Thursday, February 13th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The High Court in London has the duty to set the standard for distinguishing between Russian honesty and chicanery (the British varieties too). But it lacks the power. If the court had that, the Prime Minister, the House of Commons, the Secret Intelligence Service, the BBC, Oxford University Press, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs would be convicted of lying their heads off, and despatched from court with damages to pay, plus costs.

So it proved to be last week when the High Court ruled that Russian resident of the UK, Boris Mints, is arguably a grand larcenist whose money and assets, adding up to $570 million,  ought to be frozen until there can be a full adjudication of all the evidence.  This was the third successive High Court ruling to condemn Mints by three judges in just eight months. 

That’s a record for swift unanimity. There’s also a twist in this record, because the High Court has found Mints guilty of running away from the scene of the crime, thereby making near-certain that the part of the case the court has called arguable will be judged to be guilt for the grand larceny itself.

by Editor - Sunday, February 9th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Heir apparent, or accounting app.

In the politics of the Russian succession, Alexei Kudrin, 59 years of age, has two distinctions. The first is that he is hated by the General Staff, Igor Sechin, and a large number of Russian voters. The second is that he is loved by the US Government, the international banks, the Russian oligarchs, and President Vladimir Putin. He failed once, nine years ago, to replace Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister; Medvedev sacked him. He failed again, in May 2018, to become Putin’s vice president; Putin nominated him to be chairman of the state auditor, the Accounting Chamber, when his parliamentary vote of approval was the lowest ever. Kudrin is trying again, and Moscow sources believe Putin is already advancing him. How far will the two of them get?

by Editor - Thursday, February 6th, 2020
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