By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Can film impresarios make profits out of Russia warfighting films that demonize Vladimir Putin?

Navalny the film won an Oscar, a Lola, a Bafta, and more. The size of the audience who have seen the film remains a secret of the producers, but the box office revenues the film has earned over the past three years have been reported as just $107,186.   As Oscar-award winners go, Navalny the film has been a media failure with western audiences, a very big lossmaker for the producers. And so the European warfighting organs are hoping for better earnings from the launch of a film  they calculate has already made more money as a book. This is The Wizard of the Kremlin which in its French edition won a French Academy prize and sold a half-million copies. The author is Giuliano da Empoli.

According to reports from the Venice Film Festival late last month, at its first screening The Wizard of the Kremlin film received “a hugely enthusiastic 10-minute standing ovation” and more than a dozen bravos from an audience which was invited to watch it, not charged. On stage the film’s lead actress, a Swede playing a Russian, reportedly ” wiped away tears as the ovation continued.”  

The BBC is uncertain: “The Wizard of the Kremlin is measured and methodical, so it is unlikely to be a big hit: Baranov might remark that it isn’t gaudy and kitsch enough. But, fictionalised though it might be, it is worth watching if you want to gain some insight into how Putin came to power, and how that power has been maintained.”  The Independent, owned by the Lebedev banking family, was sure the film was too soft. “What is bound to rankle many viewers, however, is the film’s softball portrayal of Putin overall. As shown here, he is no monster. Given the ongoing war in Ukraine, it doesn’t seem like the most propitious moment for a movie like this.”  Variety: “The way Law plays him, Putin is something almost scarier than a monster — a rational tyrant, a man to mess with, or even disagree with, at your peril. He doesn’t start out by coveting power (the powers that be have come to him), but he believes that raw power, from the top, is what the Russian people crave…he perfectly channels Putin’s cold-blooded glare, infusing him with a reptilian charisma. The real Vladimir Putin has a special duality: His eyes look like they want to kill you, his mouth doesn’t move a muscle. And Law nails that.”  

Who will pay money to be told this, again? The French state public company France Télévisions and the Disney corporation are hopeful as the producers of the film, along with the Gaumont company of the Seydoux family.   

But Da Empoli’s book has dropped out of the bookshores because its sale price is less than the cost of displaying it. s. The paperback is down to $2.29, one-tenth pubklisher’s launch price.  Reread this review of the book.  

Asked in Beijing what he thinks of the film, Putin replied to the reporter: “Anastasiya Savinykh: Mr President, if I may, let us stick to the cinema. A film has been released in the West with you as one of the characters. The film is titled “The Wizard of the Kremlin.” Have you seen it? Have they shown you any frames? By the way, British actor Jude Law played you in this film. Have you met? Vladimir Putin: No, I have not seen this film. This is the first time I am hearing about it. I cannot say anything about it, because I have not seen it.”  

Read on, to save yourself the cinema ticket and the book charge.

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

Listen to the groundbreaking discussion with Nima Alkhorshid today.  

The full discussion paper of Vyacheslav Molotov to the Soviet Presidium, elaborating on the draft “General European Agreement on Collective Security in Europe” and raising the possibility of the USSR joining NATO was dated March 26, 1954. Read it in full here.  

For comparison, read the two draft treaties on mutual security presented to the US and NATO by the Russian Foreign Ministry on December 21, 2021, here.   For analysis of both treaties at the time, click.  

For the evidence from the declassified US presidential archives of the treasons of Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Chubais, click to read from 2016;   from 2018;  and from 2020.   

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

When you sit down to read, watch,  or listen to  website, blog, Twitter, or podcast on the war against Russia, do you combine it with a glass of your favourite alcohol – or is that what you’d like but it’s forbidden on your jogging track, car, bus,  or train commute?

The answer for you now is Raymond Chandler’s best line from The Long Goodbye (1953): “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

Chandler’s other best lines for now are: “we make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk” – this is how to think about President Donald Trump’s MAGA peacemaking. “If you believe in an idea, you don’t own you, it owns you” – that’s the Marxist-Leninist reality that a generation of Russians were educated to forget from 1991 and are having to re-learn today.  And “nothing says goodbye like a bullet” – that’s what President Vladimir Putin meant when he told reporters the other day in Beijing: “if common sense ultimately prevails, an acceptable option for ending this conflict can be agreed upon…We will see how it goes from here. If not, we will have to achieve the tasks set before us by military means.”

According to the most recent surveys of the American podcast audience, more than half listen as a combination of entertainment, lesson, and diversion at the same time – to have something to do when they are doing something else. That’s the big podcast difference from long-read media  – you can read Dances with Bears and drink beer or wine, but you can’t take off your own or someone else’s clothes at the same time.  Only about one in ten US listeners to podcasts do it in the old-fashioned way of desktop or laptop read.  

There’s a hitch, though. Packaging information in podcast form may lead to less short-term comprehension and less long-term memory retention than occurs in reading.  To date, there is research concluding this is true;   and also research that it’s false.  

There also appear to be national, ethnic and racial differences between blog readers and podcast listeners.   While more and more of the global audience is opting for the podcast to replace the website, blog and tweet stream, and spending increasing amounts of time on podcasts at the expense of time reading print,   in the US, the podcast option is preferred by more blacks, Hispanics and Asians than whites.   

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whichever age, ethnic or gender group you belong to, and however you prefer to think, Dances with Bears has come up with a solution for you:  this is to make podcasts with different geographical coordinates, and follow them up with long-read backgrounders on the Dances with Bears website.

There are now four podcasts for you to tune into.

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

The three questions are:

1. Has any politician in the NATO Coalition of the Willing Warfighters against Russia lied more brazenly to win his domestic election than Mark Carney (not counting Vladimir  Zelensky)?

2. Has any politician in the Coalition calculated more mistakenly that spending more on the losing war in Europe would appease and ingratiate President Donald Trump, and relieve his country of Trump’s penalty tariffs?

3. Has any politician in the Coalition benefited more personally and more directly in his bank account from fighting the Russians in the Ukraine and capitulating to Trump (except for Trump himself and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen)?

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

Novichok is a military weapon, the deadliest chemical warfare agent developed by several armies around the world over the past thirty years,  which hasn’t killed anyone.

Alexei Navalny is a Russian politician who over more than a decade nominated himself to be President Vladimir Putin’s main rival but whom just two percent of Russians have trusted enough to vote for.    

Think of Novichok and Navalny, both of them, as political fictions.

The paradox of their combination is that Navalny’s claim to have been attacked with Novichok failed to persuade Russians to support him against Putin.  Then, after he survived Novichok but died of natural causes, he lost his political value outside Russia just as he had already lost it inside Russia. However, the combination of the two fictions has served the ulterior purpose for which they were designed in Germany. This is why this book is being published for German readers now – now that they are being ruled by a chancellor with a multi-billion Euro plan to rearm Germany in order to fight the old German war against Russia once again.    

This is the conclusion for the time being.

This introduction is to the evidence of years of planning and staging by the Chancellery and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) to turn the personal medical collapse of Navalny into a public cause of war; that’s to say, preparation for war. It records the accumulation of disinformation and misinformation by the then Chancellor Angela Merkel; the BND chief Bruno Kahl, and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas;  amplified daily by Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert, and compelling the Charité Clinic in Berlin, its doctors and administrators, to falsify the medical evidence until they made the colossal mistake of publishing the clinical test results for Navalny’s bodily liquids and his hair.

Merkel, Kahl, and Maas also compelled the Swedish and French governments, along with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague under US, British and Dutch control, to report their additional testing of Navalny’s liquids as corroborating their campaign against Russia, when their tests did no such thing. The Berlin clinic tests proved their lie.

After a pack of expensively fabricated lies about the Novichok poisoning of Navalny won the Oscar of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in March 2023 for the best non-fiction film of the year, and for the same category also the German Film Academy’s Lola, there should have been little doubt that he can win another Oscar now that he’s dead. But no.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 7th, 2025
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Sunday, August 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

by Editor - Tuesday, August 5th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Listen to today’s discussion with Nima Alkhorshid as we inspect the defences being built now against President Donald Trump’s ultimatums from the Ukraine to Iran, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, India, and China.   

Before we start, though, ask whether there is any evidence in what Trump himself says to show he understands any negotiating terms short of capitulation.

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by Editor - Tuesday, August 5th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump had just turned nineteen in June 1965 when he heard on the radio the Rolling Stones sing the song which made them world famous.  “I can’t get no satisfaction,” the song began, and repeated the line, and then repeated more words.   “I can’t get no satisfaction/’Cause I try, and I try, and I try and I try/I can’t get no, I can’t get no.”

Trump’s syntax is the same, the tune he is singing is still no hit.

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by Editor - Monday, August 4th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian oligarchs created by the Yeltsin Administration and continued by the Putin Administration (with a handful of deductions) have never trusted Russia.

That’s why they have been willing to pay exorbitant prices for offshore assets – mines, steelmills, jet planes, motor yachts, Old Master paintings, and mansions with sea views – because the cash had been transferred out of Russia tax free, often stolen from other Russians or the state, sometimes in suitcases, concealed in chains of transfers between impenetrable holding companies, trusts and cutouts,  laundered  in violation of the Russian statutes on money laundering, which on Kremlin and Central Bank orders are not enforced.  In other words, money that was hot and cheap.

Naturally, this lucrative cashflow has been vulnerable to raiding by individuals, especially Russians, acting on the principle that it isn’t illegal to steal from a thief and on the method that it is easy to raid when asset ownership depended on whispers and handshakes.

When these Russian robbers have fallen out, however, they have taken their disputes to the High Court of London to adjudicate. But why would such Russians trust the British courts and lawyers? Of course, they haven’t; they don’t. But they trust the Russian courts and lawyers much less.

The most famous of the High Court cases between two Russian robbers was Boris Berezovsky versus Roman Abramovich. That was decided in 2011 by the judge on her conclusion that while on the evidence testified to, the two were grand larcenists, especially from the Russian state, Abramovich was the more convincing liar of the two. Berezovsky lost, and as he faced bankruptcy, he killed himself in his London mansion full of paintings which he couldn’t sell because they were all forgeries. Altogether, the case lasted for five years, 2007-2012; Berezovsky’s losing claim totalled $5.6 billion, and more than twenty barristers were engaged for all sides, and more than that number of solicitors.   The legal costs of the case came to more than $100 million.

This is how it ended.  Then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin added his finale months before the judge: “What can I say? It would be better if they held this trial in Russia. [Question: Would Russia gain from this economically?] This would be more honest – both for them and our country. The money was made and stolen here – let them divide it here, too.”  

Less famous, but much longer and more costly, was the group of London court cases revolving around the Russian state shipping group Sovcomflot and its associated companies which, altogether, run the largest energy tanker fleet in the world.  The cases ran for sixteen years (2005-2021); were heard by thirteen judges in the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court; in legal fees and penalties they cost more than $200 million. Two Russian shipping executives and a Russian charterer were acquitted and compensated. They were then tried in a Moscow court; convicted on evidence the London courts had dismissed; and sentenced to long prison terms in absentia, because they had won refuge from the injustice and granted asylum in the UK.

President Putin has had nothing at all to say about the two outcomes of the case. For his reasons and the conflicting directions he has given over the years on Russian shipping policy, read the book.   

The Russian aluminium (Rusal) oligarch Oleg Deripaska (lead image, right) has probably run more cases in the High Court  and over more years than any other Russian litigant. They can be followed in this archive.  In one of these lawsuits decided last year,   the judge opened his ruling by saying: “It is fair to say that the Claimants (“the Deripaska Parties”) and Vladimir Chernukhin and his company Navigator Equities Ltd (“Navigator”) (“the Chernukhin Parties”) are not the best of friends. It is also fair to say that the honesty and integrity of both of Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Chernukhin has from time to time been found to be wanting in cases before the English Courts, not least in previous proceedings before this court under sections 67 and 68 of the Arbitration Act 1996.”  — Para 1. Deripaska won  his case as the judgement concluded that “the Deripaska Parties wish to discover the identity of the persons who, it is strongly arguable, forged a document designed to deceive this court and an arbitral tribunal, and to defraud them of some US$300m. I consider that the granting of the relief sought in this case is a necessary and proportionate response to this serious wrongdoing in all the circumstances.”  — Para 123.

The notoriety of these cases and of the litigants has advertised the availability of the British courts and lawyers to serve increasingly large numbers of corporations and individuals with big-money claims and personal axes to grind. Better and more predictable value, they calculate, to spend their money on British lawyers in London courts than on bribes and other “administrative measures” in the Russian courts.

In practice, the escalation of the British Government’s war against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield and in economic sanctions, especially against the oligarchs, ought to have stopped the lawyers from taking on new cases and the courts from hearing them. But this hasn’t happened.

The big reason is the war itself — the Russians are retaliating against the sanctions by refusing to repay British and other banks for the credits they received before they were sanctioned.  The principle is the same – it isn’t illegal to steal from a thief. The foreign banks are also using the sanctions to shield themselves from the judgements of the Russian courts in paying their obligations to Russian companies.

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by Editor - Thursday, July 31st, 2025
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