By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump wants to turn the Indian Ocean (lead image) into a zone of deterrence against war. That’s to say, he aims to deter anyone from objecting to, resisting or defending against his terms for the wars (and ceasefires) US forces are currently fighting against Yemen, Iran, Sudan, and through Pakistan, against India.

Those wars, according to Trump’s National Security strategy, released last month,  are being waged, and will continue, against “threats against our supply chains that risk U.S. access to critical resources, including minerals and rare earth elements”; to “ensure that allied economies do not become subordinate to any competing power”; and to “prevent domination by any single competitor nation.”  

In the Indian Ocean and in the narrow straits between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, that last target, according to the Trump strategy paper, is currently China. But when Trump says “our commitment [is to] to a free and open Indo-Pacific” what he means is a warning for India: “we must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India to encourage New Delhi to contribute to Indo-Pacific security, including through continued quadrilateral cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (the Quad).”   

That parenthetical “other” is Trump’s cat out of the American strategy bag. It’s “unconventional diplomacy, America’s military might, and economic leverage to surgically extinguish embers of division between nuclear-capable nations and violent wars”.  

It’s also an ultimatum — either India, the nuclear-armed state which defeated Pakistan in the war of last May, improves its commercial and military “relations” with the US on Trump’s terms now; or else Trump will punish India and target it as a “competitor nation”. Trump’s carrot is that “we should present partners with a suite of inducements—for instance, high tech cooperation, defence purchases, and access to our capital markets—that tip decisions in our favor.” Trump’s stick is that “strong measures must be developed along with the deterrence necessary to keep those lanes open, free of ‘tolls,’ and not subject to arbitrary closure by one country. This will require not just further investment in our military—especially naval—capabilities, but also strong cooperation with every nation that stands to suffer, from India to Japan and beyond, if this problem is not addressed.”  

What Trump means by keeping the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean open, “free of tolls or arbitrary closure”, has the same meaning as the US Navy and allied forces are currently applying against tankers moving Russian, Iranian or Venezuelan oil.   Empires don’t use force at sea for piracy; it’s privatization, according to their rules-based international order.  

For India, Trump’s meaning is the same as it was six hundred years ago for Afonso de Albuquerque and the Portuguese; they were the first European maritime empire to attack India. Then, as now, it also meant attacking the Yemeni shore of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf shore, seizing the cargoes of vessels trading with India, killing all on board, and building forts, naval anchorages, and trading bases along the Malabar Coast.  

India and Russia have a different idea now. That’s RELOS.

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by Editor - Sunday, December 14th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Anthony Hughes was in such a hurry to open and shut the British Government’s case against President Vladimir Putin for the Novichok chemical warfare attack in England in 2018, he failed to tie the top button of his shirt.

This was also a precaution against choking on what Hughes recited as his conclusions to more than seven years of investigations, five months of autopsy, toxicology, and post-mortem pathology, then just 24 days of public hearings,  which he read from a prepared script on his desk. At the 21-minute mark,  to the doctors, lawyers, policemen, intelligence agents, and “to the many people who made the vital administrative arrangements for the Inquiry to function at all,” Hughes looked down to read out “thank you very much”; shuffled the pages into a notebook, and left the room.  No public or press questions were allowed.

It had taken a special kind of expertise for Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — to exclude the four crucial pieces of evidence which surfaced in the inquiry he has conducted since 2022 into the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death.  This is the evidence (1) that the alleged Russian Novichok weapon, a bottle of perfume, was planted by British government agents in Sturgess’s kitchen twelve days after police drug squad searches had failed to find it; (2) that the colour of the liquid in this bottle was yellow, according to an expert witness, when Novichok is colourless; (3) that the only witness to finding the perfume bottle and giving it to Sturgess, her boyfriend Charles Rowley, was so incapable of telling the truth he was excluded from testifying in public; and (4) that the expert pathologists who had conducted the post-mortem investigations between July and November 2018 had recorded enough fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream to have been the cause of her heart and then brain death  before Novichok was detected by the British chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.  

Instead, Hughes has reported only the evidence to fit the British government’s version of a Russian attack with Novichok.  

The judge did more. He reported that what he had been told of the Russian recovery of Crimea in March 2014 and the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 four months later was “the most likely analysis” of President Putin’s motivation for ordering the Novichok operation of 2018.

Hughes went further still.

“There are two more pieces of evidence,” he declared in last week’s report,   “which may be relevant to the question of Russian state responsibility for the events into which I had to inquire. One concerns an incident near to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Netherlands. The other concerns Alexei Navalny. Both are examples of second-hand evidence, or hearsay, which can of course be reliable, but which I did not have the opportunity to explore in any detail… Neither of the two additional areas of evidence now summarised would be enough by themselves to justify the conclusions which I have reached here. But both may provide some limited additional support for those conclusions, at which I arrived without needing to call upon them, and I ought to refer to them both” [page 90].

This was Hughes sticking his neck well beyond his shirt collar: the official terms of reference limited him to investigating  “how; when and where [Dawn Sturgess] came by her death; and the particulars (if any) required by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to be registered concerning the death; Identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.”  

The evidence of Russian military operations he accepted had come from “closed Inquiry hearings in January 2025,” Hughes said. “The hearings lasted several days. Attendance at the hearings was limited to myself, members of the Inquiry Team, and appropriate members of the teams for His Majesty’s Government (HMG) and Operation Verbasco. The hearings took place in a government building in London. During the closed hearings, as in the open hearings, I heard oral evidence from witnesses and also received submissions from Counsel regarding documentary evidence. A number of witnesses were called and questioned during the closed hearings. The witnesses included Commander Dominic Murphy (Commander of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15)), MK26 (Chemical and Biological Scientific Adviser, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Porton Down) and also witnesses represented by HMG. The HMG witnesses included individuals who had been personally involved in making decisions regarding Sergei Skripal’s security prior to March 2018”  [page 121].

The last sentence identifies the MI6 or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Together with the other UK government agencies, police,  and officials engaged in the manufacture and testing of chemical warfare weapons, this was a conference to compose evidence made up to look like a cross-examination and interrogation, but kept secret to shut out doubt.

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by Editor - Friday, December 12th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As all cricket and football followers know, the British are bad losers.  They blame the other side or the umpire; they stampede inside the stadium, then they riot outside.

They believe their cleverness is in getting the media to portray their defeats on the battlefield as feats of heroism. That’s been the British story against Russia from the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Novichok operation of 2018. The success of both these stories as wartime propaganda has depended on public belief in little fools sitting on tall horses — noblemen whose ambition has braced them against their deceit and camouflaged their mental incapacity.   

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Seven months ahead of time, Roman Hofman (Гофман, Gofman), military secretary (advisor) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since April 2024,  has been nominated as the new director of Mossad, succeeding David Barnea whose term ends in June 2026.

Netanyahu’s move cuts Gofman’s tenure in the prime minister’s office prematurely short; it also pre-empts Barnea’s attempt to promote succession candidates of his own with intelligence service which Hofman lacks.

According to the Israeli Government announcement, Hofman, an artillery specialist and tank commander,  qualifies for the post with “creativity, initiative, stratagem, deep recognition of the enemy, absolute discretion, and the safeguarding of secrets. These qualities, as well as his leadership and courage, were evident at the outbreak of the War of Redemption, when he rushed from his home and fought in person against Hamas terrorists in the Western Negev, where he was severely wounded.”  

The nomination of an outsider, promoted for his “aggressively offensive nature” in the Gaza war since October 2023, the December 2024 war against Syria, and then the June 2025 war against Iran, and as a personal trustie by Netanyahu, is running into criticism inside Israel,   although it is not unusual for former army generals to be moved into the Mossad.  This criticism of Hofman is not for a lack of enthusiasm towards genocide and other war crimes by the Israel Defence Forces.   

Yevgeny Krutikov, a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer and now a security analyst for Vzglyad, has just published an assessment of the Hofman appointment; he reveals not so much what the Russian intelligence services are expecting, but what they want Hofman and Netanyahu to know they think. Krutikov’s conclusion is that the move is a “result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political games, which does not correspond well with the real tasks of the country’s intelligence community. As a result, we will see a temporary reduction in so-called ‘offensive’ operations, and we can even predict a decline in the effectiveness of the Mossad, maybe even  high-visibility failures.”  

Krutikov doesn’t mention that Hofman was sent to Moscow by Netanyahu in September 2024 “to promote the [Gaza] hostage deal”.   It isn’t clear what language Hofman used, since he reportedly cannot speak English and left his Russian-speaking home in Belarus as a boy of thirteen.  Subsequent Israeli reporting from March of this year indicates that Hofman has returned to Moscow for negotiations on “strengthening cooperation between Israel and Russia in the interests of Israel’s security…also [the] Russian role in Syria.”  

While there is no Russian report of who received Hofman at the Defense Ministry or General Staff, Krutikov’s report indicates he is unrespected, untrusted, unliked.

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week it was President Donald Trump telling reporters he didn’t know what response President Vladimir Putin had made to the term-sheet for ending the Ukraine war which he sent to the Kremlin on December 2 with Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner.  

“I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing,” Trump said on December 3. “I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We’re going to find out. It’s a war that should have never been started…It’s a war if I were president — we had a rigged election. If I were president that war would have never happened. It’s a terrible thing. But I thought they had a very good meeting yesterday with President Putin. We’ll see what happens. President Putin had a very good meeting yesterday with Jared Kushner and with Steve Witkoff. What comes out of that meeting I can’t tell you because it does take two to tango. You know, Ukraine — I think we have something pretty well worked out with them…[Putin] would like to end the war. That’s what they — that was their impression. Now, whether or not — that was their impression. You know, their impression was that he would like to see the war ended. I think he’d like to get back to a more normal life. I think he’d like to be trading with the United States of America, frankly, instead of losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal. We’ll see what happens.”  

This week, on December 7, Trump claimed it is Vladimir Zelensky who doesn’t know. “So we’ve been speaking to President Putin and we’ve been speaking to Ukrainian leaders, including Zelenskyy, President Zelensky. And I have to say that I’m a little bit disappointed that President Zelenskyy hasn’t yet read the proposal. That was as of a few hours ago. His people love it, but he hasn’t. Russia’s fine with it. Russia’s, you know, Russia, Russia, I guess, would rather have the whole country, wouldn’t you think a bit? But, uh, Russia is, I believe, fine with it, but I’m not sure that Zelenskyy’s fine with it. His people love it, but he hasn’t read it.”  

Although Witkoff had telephoned Zelensky the day before, telling him the new deadline for an agreement on the term sheet is “by Christmas”,  Trump repeated the know-nothing claim in an interview on December 8.  “Well, he’s gotta read the proposal. He hadn’t re … really, he hasn’t read it yet. [Question: The most recent draft?] That’s as of yesterday. Maybe he’s read it over the night. It would be nice if he would read it. You know, a lot of people are dying. So it would be really good if he’d read it. His people loved the proposal. They really liked it. His lieutenants, his top people, they liked it, but they said he hasn’t read it yet. I think he should find time to read it.”  

As this negotiation spills into public view, there is no Russian, American, European,  or Ukrainian record that Kushner has said anything.  

However, since he returned from the Kremlin talks to the US, Kushner and his father-in-law, the President, have been busy in a multi-billion dollar bidding takeover of a Hollywood film production company,  Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). When WBD rejected the Kushner alliance bid of $41 billion in equity, $54 billion in bank loans, for a lowball offer of $83 billion from Netflix,  Trump announced he might veto the deal on monopoly grounds. “That’s got to go through a process and we’ll see what happens,” Trump announced. “Uh, Netflix is a great company… But it’s a, it’s a lot of market share so we’ll have to see what happens.”  

The next day,  Kushner, with the Trump campaign financiers the Ellison family, and the Saudi, Abu Dhabi and Qatari state investment funds proposed a hostile takeover bid of $108 billion for WBD,  all cash, no debt, to defeat Netflix.   Trump, the US government and the press have been more transparent on the term sheets for ending the war for WBD than they have for the Ukraine war.

Outwitting Trump was the objective of the summit meeting in Delhi of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 4-5.  But because the Trump White House and their media camp followers have been preoccupied with their money shot at Hollywood, the reality has been accelerating in an altogether different direction.

Here is the story in the new Dialogue Works podcast with Nima Alkhorshid.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 9th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It is rare for the ceremony of a state visit to generate such a combination of national pride and comedy at the expense of an enemy; that’s to say, making a mockery of President Donald Trump.  

This is what this Indian cartoon (lead images) of the meetings in Delhi last week of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed. The upshot is that the video is going viral in both India and Russia.   

It’s a parody of a still popular song from the 50-year old Hindi comedy Sholay. Because Dharmendra, star of the original comedy,  died two weeks ago – he was as beloved by Indian filmgoers as Yury Nikulin (d. 1997) was by the Russian audience  – there is special Indian emotion in the song’s revival today.   For Russians, the cartoon is also a reminder of the 50-year old Ugly American defeated with Russian help on the battlefields of Vietnam, and revived again by Trump, depicted here with a hand on his impotent hosepipe.  

“We will keep our friendship”, Modi and Putin sing together as they refill the tank of their motorbike from the Russian petrol bowser, ignoring the US one and spinning Trump around in fury as they accelerate away. “We will take on the world.” That’s the message for Trump and his officials whose verbal insults, tariffs and visa penalties for India  have transformed public opinion across India. “We will keep on dealing”, they sing at Trump who has ordered India to stop buying Russian oil for their refineries or pay a 50% penalty on all trade. “We will not break this friendship. Difficulties will come but we will not leave you.”  

In his official welcome speech, Modi told Putin: “After the Ukraine crisis, we have been in touch…You have also been making us aware of the developments as a true friend. This trust is a big strength, and we have discussed this issue many times…whenever I have spoken to world leaders, I have always told them that India is not neutral, India is on the side of peace, we support all efforts towards peace. And we stand shoulder to shoulder in these peace efforts.”  

In a second speech, Modi linked the war Russia is fighting against the US and NATO in the Ukraine and the war India fought against Pakistan last May: “India and Russia,” the Prime Minister said, “have always supported one another and worked shoulder to shoulder in the fight against terrorism. The terrorist attack in Pahalgam and the cowardly atrocity at Crocus City Hall  are connected by a common, hateful ideology. India firmly believes that terrorism constitutes a direct assault on universal human values. Our unity within the global community is the only effective way to combat this evil.”  

Putin responded with discreet references to the sanctions war Trump is waging against both Russia and India: “Our two countries have developed resilient interbank channels for lending and financial transactions. Russian economic actors have been making wider use of the rupees they generate from export contracts….There has been positive momentum in our energy partnership. Russia is a reliable supplier of energy resources and everything India needs for developing its energy sector. We are ready to continue ensuring uninterrupted fuel supplies for the Indian economy to support its rapid expansion.”  

Putin’s first line is the new realism Modi accepts; the two of them have begun to work in the secrecy required to secure against Trump’s sanctions and tariff war.  Putin’s last line is more optimistic than the Indian side is prepared to be, also in secrecy.   

Indian and Russian sources acknowledge the personal bonhomie between the two leaders and the  “positive momentum” of the 70-point Joint Statement issued at the close of the meetings.  Putin added there is “clear potential” to increase the export-import trade between the two countries to $100 billion. He conceded, however, that the 12% growth of the trade turnover between 2023 and 2024 to “between US$64 and US$65 billion” has not grown this year and “will stand at a comparable level”.  If the Indian government figure for last year was in fact $63.8 billion,   

then this year’s total may prove to be less, taking into account the decline in crude oil volumes in the last quarter.

Indian officials and business analysts are frank: “How much of this bonhomie will translate into trade figures, particularly in achieving the much-touted goal of reaching $ 100 billion in bilateral trade between these two trusted neighbours? While $100 billion trade by 2030 may be an ambitious target, what may really happen is a significant reduction in India’s import of Russian oil after the recent US sanctions. This may actually lead to a big fall in bilateral trade in the near term. Subsequently India Russia trade will have to be rebuilt on a more sustainable footing outside of oil trade.”  

An Indian source in Moscow adds: “As Putin announced, the Russians are willing to do their utmost to sell oil — whatever it takes. This promises real short-term benefits. But this has no long-term benefits for us. Russians are proposing more sales of high-tech defence equipment and we are interested. This is because we trust Russians more than we trust the US and France. But Russians know our goal is to produce locally. Almost none of the top-thousand Russian private businesses have shown any interest in India since the so-called Eastern Pivot was announced from 2014 and they were not visible in Delhi.”

Sberbank and VTB have announced their presence in India, and the Russian Central Bank is opening a representative office in Mumbai.  These are the necessary “resilient interbank channels for lending and financial transactions”, which Putin announced. For “resilient”, read protection from Trump.  However, a Delhi investment financier comments: “We consider these to be baby steps when they [Russians] should be taking giant leaps.”

The underlying problem is that for Indian exports to grow in the Russian market, the Russian oligarchs and leading businesses need to invest in manufacturing in India, with the aim of then exporting to the Russian consumer market as well as to the rest of the world.  This has been the model for US foreign direct investment (FDI) in India so far.

However, at least half, possibly as much as three-quarters of current foreign direct investment in India is coming from Indian oligarchs and businesses operating through offshore low-tax havens like Mauritius, Singapore, UAE, Lichtenstein,  and Cyprus. Also, this FDI is coming from the Indian business diaspora in the US and UK.  In India they are as reluctant to compete against new Russian investors, as the Russian oligarchs and businesses are reluctant to run India risks for their assets – unless they have the protection of the state or of Indian partners.

Laugh, then listen to the discussion led by Dimitri Lascaris of the Russia-India-China strategic relationship which the Yankocentric podcasters are missing.  

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by Editor - Monday, December 8th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

One needs to have memory in order to have hope for the future, doesn’t one?

Regis Tremblay leads the discussion of my career in Russian politics and journalism. Click to view.  Follow the Regis Tremblay substack here.  

by Editor - Sunday, December 7th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was Black Tuesday, December 2, in Moscow, when Russian leaders negotiated the crucial  questions of war and peace with their chief enemy the US, and chief allies China and India. To understand what has happened, Chris Cook, editor-in-chief of the leading (last) independent radio for news analysis in Canada, asks five big questions:

Question (1): Who is claiming victory in the Ukraine now? (2) Why did Putin give an audience to the two underlings of President Donald Trump? (3) How to explain why Trump is negotiating battlefield armistice with the Kremlin with money men, not with army generals? (4) Why is Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney sending a fresh C$200 million to the Ukraine on top of more than C$22 billion already spent  – is he Trump’s patsy to pick up the tab for the defeat? (5) To stave off this defeat, are we, the Europeans and Canadians, ready for an even bigger war with Russia?  

Answer: the Europeans (and Canadians) are ready to lie for the war against Russia, but not to fight themselves, and emphatically not to lose the war through their proxies — yesterday it was the Chechens and Georgians; today it’s the Ukrainians; tomorrow it will be the Poles, Balts, Finns.

Translation: lies, deceit, cant – the thesaurus lists eighteen synonyms in English for the way in which Trump, Carney,  and other leaders of the war alliance against Russia speak. The Gorilla Radio interviews have documented the full eighteen coming out of the mouth of Prime Minister Carney once he believed he was secure in the prime ministry. President Trump has a more limited range by contrast.

In response to the Gorilla’s questions, Trump remained silent for more than 48 hours.

He then answered White House reporters by acknowledging he doesn’t know the answers, repeating himself with pecksniffery: “I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing. I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We’re going to find out. It’s a war that should have never been started…It’s a war if I were president — we had a rigged election. If I were president that war would have never happened. It’s a terrible thing. But I thought they had a very good meeting yesterday with President Putin. We’ll see what happens. President Putin had a very good meeting yesterday with Jared Kushner and with Steve Witkoff. What comes out of that meeting I can’t tell you because it does take two to tango. You know, Ukraine — I think we have something pretty well worked out with them…[Putin] would like to end the war. That’s what they — that was their impression. Now, whether or not — that was their impression. You know, their impression was that he would like to see the war ended. I think he’d like to get back to a more normal life. I think he’d like to be trading with the United States of America, frankly, instead of losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal. We’ll see what happens.”  

Listen now to anticipate what will happen next.

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by Editor - Thursday, December 4th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a single day of this week, Tuesday December 2, Russian officials admitted that negotiations of an end-of-war settlement with the US are failing for lack of American specificity on the territorial and demilitarization issues and of “genuineness” and “sincerity” on ending the sanctions war;  that there are serious, unresolved, and unexplained differences with strategic ally China; and that in response to questions from strategic ally India, the Kremlin is unready to say what side President Vladimir Putin will take if fighting breaks out again between Indian and Chinese forces along their Himalayan frontier.

The hegemonic media of the western alliance against Russia have missed all three. But so too have the Americanocentric alt-media and the Yankocentric podcasters. An exception is Jamarl Thomas in today’s 78-minute podcast, Click to view:  starting at Min 1:33:06.

In their afternoon walk in the centre of Old Moscow (lead image), and then in their five-hour conversation at the Kremlin, President Donald Trump’s negotiator Steven Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner appeared to be pointing in the wrong direction to save Trump from losing his Ukraine war to the advancing Russian military.

“Not an easy situation, let me tell you,” Trump told a Cabinet meeting in front of reporters as  Witkoff and Kushner were halfway through their meeting at the Kremlin, before they reported back to Trump. “What a mess. It’s a war that never would have happened if I were president.” Asked if he had an “update”, Trump replied: “No update, because I’ve been spending too much time with you. I mean, we’re spending a lot of time in here. We wanted to do this very — you talk about being open and transparent. This has to be the most transparent administration in history. No, I don’t — I will have after I leave here. ”  

That was noon time in Washington. The Kremlin meeting ended two hours later. Witkoff and Kushner then went to the US Embassy to telephone the White House. They have said nothing in public, not even to their favourite megaphone, Fox News. Its headline was “diplomatic deadlock”, relying entirely on the detailed readout of the negotiations from Yury Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser.  

Trump has remained uncharacteristically silent through the day and night which have followed. He has answered no reporter question on the Kremlin meeting; published no tweet.  

Instead, he agreed that Marco Rubio, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State,   should speak to Fox on Trump’s behalf. Up went the smokescreen.

“At the end of the day, it’s not up to us.  It’s not our war,” Rubio claimed. “We’re not fighting it.”  Rubio was conceding that Trump’s effort to withdraw from the war with a peace agreement was also weakening. “If there is a way to bridge the divide between the two sides, we’re the only ones in the world that can do it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Rubio claimed also that the Ukrainians are winning territory, not losing it. “What people forget, Sean [Hannity, Fox], is that at some point in this war, Russia controlled substantially more territory in Ukraine than they do now.  The Ukrainians – if you look at what that map looked like in March or April after the invasion, or May, three months after the invasion, and what it looks like now, the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians way back from where they were.  So they’ve already achieved tremendous things.”   

The blame to come, Rubio concluded, would not be Trump’s but Putin’s.

“Ultimately it’s going to be up to them.  If they decide they don’t want to end the war, then the war will continue…It’s hard to tell about confidence level on it, because ultimately the decisions have to be made, in the case of Russia, by Putin alone, not his advisors.   Putin – only Putin can end this war on the Russian side…I think we’ve made some progress.  We’ve gotten closer, but we’re still not there.  We’re still not close enough.  But that could change.  I hope it changes.”  

Trump and his officials weren’t pointing in the wrong direction, Rubio was saying. Ushakov’s catalogue of the differences Putin had just elaborated to Witkoff and Kushner was, Rubio insisted, Putin’s mistake. For the silent Trump Rubio was refusing to get the Russian message. Instead, Trump and his men weren’t giving up on Kiev. “What we have tried to do – and I think have made some progress – is figure out what could the Ukrainians live with that gives them security guarantees for the future they’re never going to be invaded again, allows them not just to rebuild their economy but to prosper as a country, be a country that has an economy that grows.  Theoretically, doing the right things, in 10 years Ukraine’s GDP could be larger than Russia’s.”  

If Witkoff had told Putin otherwise – there is no evidence that Kushner opened his mouth to say anything in Moscow – the Trump line is now as clearly negative towards Russia’s terms as the Europeans and the Zelensky regime in Kiev.

But it is the Europeans, Putin has insisted publicly, who have “abandoned peace talks and are now impeding President Trump…they have no peace agenda; they are on the side of war. Even when they ostensibly attempt to introduce amendments to Trump’s proposals, we see this clearly – all their amendments are directed towards one single aim: to completely obstruct this entire peace process, to put forward demands that are utterly unacceptable to Russia (they understand this), and thereby subsequently to place the blame for the collapse of the peace process upon Russia. That is their objective. We see this plainly.”

After Rubio has spoken for Trump, tidying up after Witkoff and Kushner, what exactly can be seen plainly now?

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The war to end all wars is a refrain which began with the British in 1914.  It was a domestic political ploy to convince those who should pay and then die.  

They paid, they died, and though the line was discredited within a decade, they still pay. Nowadays, the British (not only them) are persuaded that if they pay, the Russians will die.

When the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced on Tuesday morning that the terms on which the Russian Army will stop advancing across the Ukraine must be “for many generations to come”, he was talking to the Russians, not to the Americans, Europeans or Ukrainians. “We highly appreciate the efforts of US President Trump and his administration,” Peskov added, “and we want to solve our security problems for many generations to come.”  

Putin had explained the night before in Moscow. The Europeans (he included the British) “have no peace agenda; they are on the side of war. Even when they ostensibly attempt to introduce amendments to Trump’s proposals, we see this clearly – all their amendments are directed towards one single aim: to completely obstruct this entire peace process, to put forward demands that are utterly unacceptable to Russia (they understand this), and thereby subsequently to place the blame for the collapse of the peace process upon Russia. That is their objective. We see this plainly.”  

The conclusion for Russians is obvious, Putin added. “If Europe wants to wage a war against us and suddenly starts a war with us, we are ready. There should be no doubt about that. The only question is if Europe suddenly starts a war against us, I think very quickly…Europe is not Ukraine. In Ukraine, we are acting with surgical precision. You see my point, don’t you? It is not a war in the direct, modern sense of the word. If Europe suddenly decides to go to war against us and actually follows through with it, then a situation may arise very quickly where we will be left with no one to negotiate with.”  

Putin was making the same point for President Donald Trump and his generals to hear. The warning is nuclear war,  or the Oreshnik,  or both.

In point of fact, according to the latest opinion polls, Russians believe the US to be the far greater enemy to Russia than the European alliance; the Ukraine trails in third place. Also, the opinion polls reveal, public trust in the decision-making of President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the government and the parliament has begun to turn downwards. This is a caution that a temporary deal with the US, on terms paying cash rewards to the Trump family and to the Russian oligarchs, but do not end the economic warfare at once and restart the fighting within five years, will be unacceptable.

The picture of Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner smiling across the table at Putin, Yury Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev on Tuesday afternoon is understood by Russian voters to show the enemy’s money is doing the talking. The absence from the Kremlin table of the Russian generals with whom Putin was talking at their command post on Monday  is not the reassurance Peskov intended to give.

Click to view the new discussion with Nima Alkhorshid of the precedents for peace-making and for continuing the war against Russia,  which were first set at the Versailles conference after World War I,  and then in the capitulation documents for the defeated Germans and Japanese in 1945. It is by these standards, and what we recognise of their failure to solve Russia’s “security problems for many generations to come”, that Russians are judging the latest round of table talks.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025
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