By John Helmer, Moscow

The confrontation last week between Russian aircraft and a US-Polish naval operation in the Baltic Sea, within shooting distance of Kaliningrad, was a long anticipated and professionally executed exercise by the military commanders of all three countries. “Unprofessional”, as Admiral Mark Ferguson commanding US Naval Forces in Europe called it, was the very least thing it was. But who provoked, who feinted, who attacked first, and who defended are questions the publicity that has followed is meant to obscure.

One outcome that was not anticipated by either the attackers or defenders has begun to materialize in Warsaw. There, the rhetoric of military buildup along Poland’s eastern frontier has run into the cold calculation that Poland’s survival chances aren’t likely to be much better than those of the USS Donald Cook, if there had been a real firefight, Turkish style.
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by Editor - Sunday, April 17th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Clifford Gaddy (lead image, left) has never recovered from his 20-year infatuation with Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin. Neither has Gaddy’s boss at Brookings Institution in Washington, Strobe Talbott (right), the regime changer-in-chief at the State Department in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was his man in the Kremlin, and the rest of the country too weak to resist.

If only they ruled Russia today, President Chubais, Prime Minister Kudrin or vice versa, instead of President Vladimir Putin, there could never ever be the Kremlin plot Gaddy and Brookings charged last week for blackmailing United States officials and their allies with something like the Panama Papers. A regime-changing plot like that isn’t as preposterous as it sounds — not because Putin thought of it, as Gaddy now claims, but because Gaddy and Talbott used it a good many times themselves in Moscow, and in Belgrade too, until Putin put a stop to them. For lossmaking Brookings, however, putting a stop to Putin’s plotting is a desperate advertisement for badly needed funds.
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by Editor - Monday, April 11th, 2016
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by Editor - Thursday, April 7th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Marche Slave and The Farewell of Slavianka, Tchaikovsky’s and Agapkin’s marches against the Turks, are always going to be popular in Moscow, whatever the Turks do. John Philip Sousa is not a name that’s heard on Moscow radio, and his Stars & Stripes Forever will not be broadcast.

Far from killing classical music on Russian radio, since the present war started audience numbers for Radio Orfei (Orphee, Orpheus), the national broadcaster of classical music, are up 20%. Over the past decade the audience for classical music radio in Russia has grown fourfold. Not so in the UK and US. Even with cash from the National Lottery, the classical listening audience in the UK is dwindling, dying of natural causes, like old age
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by Editor - Wednesday, April 6th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Mr Hiccup (left) was the lead character of an Italian-Swiss cartoon of thirty years ago. His chronic hiccups persisted for years, inflicting cost, pain and misfortune on almost everyone unlucky enough to meet him. In each of 39 episodes Mr Hiccup tried a new remedy, but he always failed. Others paid the price. And so it’s been for Mikhail Fridman (right), the Russian oligarch, who had lunch with the Financial Times last month. That’s when Fridman revealed he’s Mr Hiccup.
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by Editor - Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Victoria Nuland (lead image, right), the US official in charge of regime change in Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, has repeated her tactics, this time to put pressure on the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left).

The opening of a secret US indictment on March 21, after years of inaction, followed the arrest in Florida of Reza Zarrab on March 19. The moves have been interpreted by officials in Moscow, Nicosia and Ankara as a carbon-copy of the law enforcement scheme applied against Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash following the putsch in Kiev which ousted Firtash’s ally, President Victor Yanukovich, in February 2014. US litigation to threaten Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades has also been attempted by Nuland for several months.

The arrest of Zarrab in the US, comments a Russian political analyst, Andrei Manoilo, is more pinch than putsch. “It is not so much an attempt by Washington to remove Erdogan through squeezing Zarrab for secret information about the financial relationships Erdogan has had with Iran; as it reflects the desire to put Erdogan on a new leash, and make him better controllable and dependent on the will of the United States.”
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by Editor - Monday, April 4th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Mikhail Fridman, the control shareholder of a large Russian banking, telecommunications, grocery, and oil and gas group, has held another lunch with the Financial Times to demonstrate that he doesn’t want to answer questions about the risks to his assets in the Ukraine, where he was born and where he remains the largest individual Russian investor; in the United States, where his Vimpelcom company is listed on the NASDAQ exchange and recently pleaded guilty to corruption charges; in London, where his asset holding LetterOne is now based; or in Russia which has issued his passport. At a London restaurant interview published on April 2, Fridman has also lunched to demonstrate what the Financial Times (FT) reported at its first lunch with him, on March 15, 2003, as “ our newspaper’s reputation for independence…supported by a strict separation of editorial from advertising.”

“The only separation the FT makes is between money and power”, responds a Moscow publisher. “The FT hates Russian power, but loves Russian money. Without inhibition, it advertises both, and calls the product a newspaper.”
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by Editor - Sunday, April 3rd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A US Government effort to advance Turkish interests on Cyprus, and block Russia’s relationship with the government in Nicosia, has become the newest campaign of Victoria Nuland (lead image, left), the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Ukraine and the campaign for regime change in Moscow. The target of the fresh campaign, according to media reporting in Cyprus, is President Nicos Anastasiades. After warning Anastasiades to stay away from Moscow a year ago, Nuland has been back to Nicosia twice – in September, and then again in December – with a combination of threats and rewards to get Anastasiades to submit.

The rewards include new US arms and financing for the Cypriot security forces, ending the 24-year American military embargo on the island. The threats are aimed at terms which Anastasiades and his foreign minister, Ioannis Kasoulides, have been negotiating with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for an expansion of Russian military supplies, port and airforce facilities in Cyprus; and for increased trade and investment to overcome European Union (EU) sanctions.

According to the Cyprus Mail, a long-time promoter of Anglo-American interests on the island, Anastasiades is being pressured, not by the US, but by the Kremlin. Russia “does not want him to sign a settlement of the Cyprus problem,” the newspaper reported last week. The Cyprus Mail was reacting to growing concern among high-ranking Cyprus officials and members of parliament at evidence of Cyprus corruption spilling out of a New York court case.

This is the case pursued by Leonid Lebedev, a Russian politician and businessman on the run from Russian fraud charges. Lebedev, a Cyprus citizen since 2011, now lives in homes in Limassol and Los Angeles. According to the reported speculation in Cyprus, the evidence in the Lebedev case is “a warning to Nik[os Anastasiades] that more revelations would follow, if he did not hold back on the Cyprus talks.” Whether Lebedev’s “revelations” are a Russian threat, or one of Nuland’s, Cyprus sources say they aren’t sure.
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by Editor - Tuesday, March 29th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

When empires collapse, it’s the death of the big beasts that is noticed first. In time, it’s the midgets of the empire which tell the longer story of the breaks in evolution. Just so, thirty-five million years before the dinosaurs made their exit, several Mesozoic creatures fell into pine resin, and have been preserved as fossilized amber for us to analyse how they came to their end.

One of them is the microwhip scorpion (Electrokoenenia yaksha). His problem was that his stinger caused a lot of prehistoric pain — until his victims found the antidote for him. Today, petrified in amber, you wonder how such a pinprick of a creature could have caused such mischief.

To make sure that the defeat of the American empire in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, will be preserved to tell the tale, the US Senate has proposed a $40 million fund for embalming its warriors. In fossil form, our descendants may decide to pin them to their bosoms as jewellery. For us, Senate Bill No. 2692 is a reassurance that there will be a keepsake of the last remaining lies of the US Government in its warfare against the rest of the world. Introduced a week ago, on March 16, the bill is titled the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016. But is $40 million enough to obscure the fact that noone in the civilized world believes the United States Government any longer?
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by Editor - Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It’s not often that a king of venerable line comes to Moscow to bargain over the price of a tangerine. It’s also unusual that President Vladimir Putin tells his state guest that he doesn’t understand why the trade between their two countries has fallen sharply. That’s a question which should have been answered in his briefing papers, especially since the trade has already begun to recover strongly. So what exactly did King Mohammed VI of Morocco negotiate with President Putin at the Kremlin last week?
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by Editor - Sunday, March 20th, 2016
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