By John Helmer, Moscow

For one day  in London every June and December, the Russian assets which regularly pass through greased palms on terms dismal for their repetitiveness,  are of a beauty to make you forget the damage the trade does to the country and its people. The Russian Art Week auctions are the occasion. The results are an indicator of the price the Russian market, and also the foreign one, place on this beauty.

The auction houses claim not to know who buys and who sells. In fact, they keep the identities and addresses secret. That’s because the money for which the art works were exchanged  may have been dishonestly come by at the start, hot in transit, and laundered now.

“Optimism for the future of Russia is at an all-time low”, commented a well-known London art dealer this week. “People with money are escaping and buying art. The good news about this week’s prices in London is that they could have been much worse. A bigger group of Russians is now buying at lower prices per work,  so the cumulative total is a big one for the auction houses. You could say that the best Russian art is better priced to be more affordable if you are rich but not super-rich.”

A Russian art market source adds: “economic distress has always been good for the Russian art market. What you see today is that the old classes of St. Petersburg aristocrats and Moscow merchants who fled a century ago are now selling what they took with them to remind them of the country they left behind. Their heirs feel no sentiment towards Russia, or they are hostile. The buyers are also Russians on the run, but they are still sentimental. The paintings sold this week are being swapped between Russian exiles. They aren’t going back to the motherland. The state isn’t buying, and most people are too poor. The rich are buying for walls of chateaux in France and English country houses.”    (more…)

by Editor - Friday, June 9th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

First question:  What is as mealy as ex-Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski but not as tart as his wife, American journalist and Russia-hater Anne Applebaum?  Answer: the Polish apple scam.  Second question:  What has more worms in it than the Polish apple scam?  That’s the Russian apple scam. (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The late Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died on May 26 near Washington, DC, was another of the Russia-hating Galicians who grew up in safe haven in Canada. Like Chrystia Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak,  though the late Chomiak may have murdered the late Brzezinski if he had managed to get his hands on him during World War II.
(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, June 4th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The widow of Cyrus Vance, the only US Secretary of State to resign in protest against his president’s actions in a hundred years, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and Vance’s rival, “that awful man”. Not a single official of the State Department under Vance during the Carter Administration of 1977 to 1981, thought differently. Most of them had monosyllabic terms for Brzezinski.  Since Brzezinski died last Friday, not a single member of his own  White House staff has made a public statement in his honour, memory or defence. The mute ones include Madeleine Albright, who owed to Brzezinski her career promotion as an academic, then White House staffer, then Secretary of State herself.  

Despite the disloyalty of those closest to him, and the detestation for Bzezinski of those further away, he was, and remained, Carter’s favourite. Between 1977 and 1981, Brzezinski’s time with Carter, according to the White House logs, amounted to more than 20% of the president’s working time.  That’s 12 minutes of every hour — no other official came close. On Friday, shortly after Brzezinski’s death was announced by his family, Carter issued a statement extolling him as “a superb public servant…inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor …brilliant, dedicated, and loyal. I will miss him.”   

What was this bond between them, and why does it matter now?  One reason is that what they did together were the freshest American operations studied at KGB schools in Moscow by a recruit in training at the time named Vladimir Putin.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 31st, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

If ever there was a man who displayed on his face the evil on his mind, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, (lead image, right) who died last week at a hospital near Washington.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who employed Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor between 1977 and 1981, the only high official post Brzezinski reached, said he “helped me set vital foreign policy goals, was a source of stimulation for the departments of defense and state, and everyone valued his opinion.”  Of Carter’s three claims, only the first is true; the second is ironic hyperbole; the third is completely false. If Carter cannot tell the truth now about Brzezinski, after having 36 years to reflect on it, Carter reveals the principal source of Brzezisnki’s power, when he exercised it.   For Carter was no innocent ventriloquized by the evil Svengali (lead image, left), as in the original Svengali tale. Carter was simply more mendacious than Brzezinski, and is entirely to blame for doing what Brzezinski told him to do.   (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

It used to be fashionable for European tourists of high class, especially the ladies with their menfolk, to visit wars and enjoy the display of artillery at night; the clash of infantry and cavalry on the battlefield; and the morgues where the casualties were displayed in naked and dismembered heaps afterwards. Frisson tourism then, extreme or shock tourism today.

The Crimean War, for example, was further away from London and Paris than St. Petersburg, but was visited by more British and French than Russian tourists; that was because the Anglo-French side was winning. These days American tourists do not cruise the waterways of the Persian Gulf; trek in the Afghan mountains; holiday in houseboats on the Tigris; or visit the ancient ruins of Leptis Magna (Libya)  and Palmyra (Syria).  The reason isn’t want of aesthetic taste for the sights or of appetite for frisson.   It’s because the US is losing the wars in those places. Tourists, like soldiers, want value for money and they aim to return home. (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 24th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska (lead image, right), the controlling executive of Rusal, Russia’s state aluminium monopoly,  has run into difficulty winning the approval of the British Government’s stock exchange regulator, the UK Listing Authority (UKLA),  for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares in EN+. This is the holding unit through which Deripaska runs Rusal; the Siberian hydroelectricity generating company Eurosibenergo;  and coal and molybdenum mines.  Asked to respond to the informal approach which has been made so far on Deripaska’s behalf, UKLA spokesman Chris Hamilton refused to confirm or deny the approach, adding: “any interaction we may have with a firm wanting to list is confidential so [it] isn’t something we can comment on even off the record.”

Rusal insiders say no international bank has accepted Deripaska’s mandate to manage and underwrite a London Stock Exchange (LSE) listing for EN+.  That leaves only Kremlin backing for the share sale through the state banks, said the insider.  “My understanding is that VTB and Sberbank play an active role in it.”  

An earlier attempt, promoted by Deripaska in Bloomberg at the start of February, for Rusal to sell its shares on the LSE, was a feint, a Rusal source said. It was aimed at deterring Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim group, a minority shareholder which has been trying to sell its 17% stake in Rusal for years, from making a deal at a discount to the market price for the share. “It has never been seriously considered,” the Rusal insider said. “It was EN+’s and Rusal’s attempt to thwart Onexim’s sale of its Rusal shares to the market, which Deripaska considered harmful to Rusal. This is an example of fake news.”

Part of the problem, London market sources add, is that the EN+ share sale is viewed outside Russia as a bid by the Kremlin to demonstrate investor confidence in the future of  the Russian economy, despite sanctions.  “But if you can’t disguise that nobody is buying except for the Russian state banks, then the scheme is self-defeating, just  as the Rosneft share sale was last year.”  For details of that story, read. 

Another problem, market sources in London say, is that Deripaska himself has already demonstrated considerable risks for investors in the Hong Kong listing of Rusal, now priced at a third of its IPO value. Deripaska risk, they add, also led to the US Government rejecting a deal for the sale of the Opel division of General Motors to a Deripaska-led combination with Sberbank and German government funding; Deripaska was turned down in 2009. For details, read this. Last month, the Opel sale was agreed to the French Peugeot PSA group.

On May 15 Deripaska launched a lawsuit in federal US court in Washington, DC, in a bid to defend his reputation in that country. “Mr. Deripaska has never stolen assets from Ukraine or elsewhere”, lawyers for Deripaska say in the 12-page complaint against Associated Press (AP) of New York, which can be read here. It is defamatory, the lawyers add, to make Deripaska “appear to have been engaged in criminal conduct” and “making him appear infamous or odious.” (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 21st, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

A Washington Post reporter has revealed that the Islamic State (IS) laptop plot story, which President Donald Trump mentioned to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the White House last week came from IS itself, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The reason for the leaking against Trump, which followed in the Post and in the Anglo-American media, has also been disclosed by the Post. The CIA and at least one senior staff official of the National Security Council, who briefed the CIA on what Trump had said, are angry at the President for revealing collaboration between IS operatives and their US Government handlers in attacks on Russian targets, including Russian airline travellers. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, May 16th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

When it first appeared in Washington in December 2013, the semi-thousand page biography of Vladimir Putin by two minor American think-tank researchers, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, was judged to be a valuable compilation of everything the US news media and other government-funded think-tanks had already reported, suspected or believed about the Russian president for the previous decade. No more, no less. In Russia, since no knowledgeable or politically significant Russian contributed evidence to the book,  much less. 

The subsequent publication of chapters on the putsch in Ukraine in February 2014, the accession of Crimea, Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the US war to overthrow Putin and fight Russia everywhere in  cyberspace, added nothing more remarkable in Washington, and nothing novel (non-fictional sense) in Moscow.

But had Hill not been appointed a few weeks ago as President Donald Trump’s (lead image, right) director of Russia at the National Security Council (lead left), the principal foreign policy advisor serving the President,  Hill’s book, with its one thousand and one footnotes, and fifteen single-spaced pages of references, led by Hill and Gaddy  themselves, The Economist, and extracts from the Voice of America,  would have been as inconsequential as  they have already proved to be for years. However, Trump’s confidence in, and dependence on Hill’s advice on Putin, and the campaign to impeach Trump himself for high crimes and misdemeanours in association with Putin, change the way the book  must now be interpreted.

Does the evidence that Hill spent two formative years as a student at an institute in Moscow where she rubbed shoulders with Russians bound for, and already bound to, the two state intelligence services, GRU (military intelligence) and SVR (foreign intelligence),  require a counter-intelligence assessment because of the risk which was unforeseen until now?   

Hill’s Moscow time is a detail of her resume which has yet to be identified in US media reporting and Congressional committee vetting.  But as a Russian source from the institute points out, “this is especially curious if we take into account the fact that the Moscow State Linguistic University is a source of supply of employees for GRU and SVR.  It was during the Soviet period, and it remains the same nowadays.” As another Russian source familiar with the secret services points out, by the standard of investigation the CIA, FBI and the US media now apply to Trump, his appointees, business associates, advisers, family,  and friends, does this detail require special scrutiny for Hill? “Her book,” claims the source, “is so full of false leads and dead-ends, don’t the Americans wonder if Hill is a sleeper agent, recruited long ago with the mission to keep the Americans as ignorant of Russia as her book on Putin demonstrates?”

If Hill is a continuing Russian penetration risk at the White House, then is there also the risk that the potentially culpable General Michael Flynn, National Security Adviser between January 20 and February 13, 2017, and his successor General H.R. McMaster, have failed to protect Trump himself? (more…)

by Editor - Monday, May 15th, 2017
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The first meeting of Canada’s new Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (lead image, left) with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (right) has backfired when Freeland addressed Lavrov in Russian, and Lavrov replied that speaking in Russian will soon be illegal according to a new law proposed by the Canadian-backed regime in Ukraine.  “While Chrystia Freeland is free to speak Russian here in Alaska,” Lavrov told the press, “in Ukraine, where Russian has long been a native language for a huge number of people, it could soon lose its standing and status.”

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 14th, 2017
No Comments »