by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.

This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies  are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment, deception and fraud is unaccountably large. This is the reason Durov has failed to secure the US regulator’s  permission to sell shares in his $30 billion valuation of Telegram in a US initial public offering (IPO). In short, the freedom and privacy Durov claims his Telegram social media platform represents is not at all what the financial reports reveal of his money-making.

The first fraud flag was waved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2019 after more than a year of Durov’s money-raising through digital tokens he called Grams which he offered to sell for $1.5 billion.  At the time, cornerstone investors in Durov included the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other oligarchs. 

Durov —  announced the SEC — “seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public…  the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”

In the five years since then, Durov claims to have sold another billion-dollar bond in 2021;   $210 million in fresh securities in 2023;  and $330 million in paper which Durov floated in March of this year. “The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization”, he said (telegrammed) at the time.  

These investments weren’t exactly money for value, or vice versa. Durov has admitted he has been buying about a quarter of the debt issues himself.  “Valuations are based on market inputs that are not observable,” reported a blockchain industry analyst.  

When the investors have turned out to be governments – like Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi emirate wealth fund  — the real value Durov promised to exchange is likely to be as much political and military as financial. Similar terms of exchange are likely to have been agreed when,  in addition to his Russian passport in the name of Durov, he took passports from the United Arab Emirates (name unknown), France (name Paul du Rove), and St Kitts and Nevis.

Four months ago, Durov signed financial reports for his Telegram group prepared and audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC).  He thought the details would remain secret. Instead, following his arrest and indictment in France last week, they were leaked to the Financial Times in London. The newspaper claims it “got its hands on the privately held company’s financials” but without explanation it is withholding them from full release.  Durov’s signature is dated April 26, 2024.

In public defence of his countryman, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that Durov had been naïve about the “old system of globalization…P.V. Durov turned out to be too, too free, too slow or did not listen to Western advice about the so-called moderation of his brainchild.”  

Naivety is not what Durov signed his name to in Telegram’s financial reports.

They reveal he is running a debt pyramid, replenishing the annual deficit between his expenditures and his income with new borrowings whose cost of servicing amounted in 2023 to 46% of his revenues. The leaked papers also disclose that his losses last year came to $259.3 million, although Durov managed to reduce that to $173.2 million by claiming offsetting digital assets had jumped in value. To support such valuation manipulations and his public claims of Telegram’s $30 billion market value,   the small print of the auditor’s notes reveal that Durov uses his own digital money to boost the appearance of rising Telegram subscription numbers and demand for the company’s bonds — 15,000 subs and $64 million in bonds, to be precise.

As for protecting Telegram user privacy, Durov acknowledges that after subtracting $130 million in self-accounting “integrated wallet” value from his bottom-line revenue of $342.5 million, over the past year he sold “collectibles” for $17.8 million – almost 9%. This item is defined in the report as “usernames, virtual phone numbers…The related revenue is recognised at a point in time when the collectible is assigned to the user. The Group also enables the sale of collectibles between users and receives the fee for facilitating the sale.”

According to the public indictment of the French prosecutors, fraud is one of the charges against Durov, along with money laundering, concealment by cryptology, and “refusal to communicate, at the request of the authorized authorities, the information or documents necessary for the realization and exploitation of interceptions authorized by law.”  

According to Russian and international sources, the recent history of each one of these charges involves Durov in dealings with the Azerbaijan government, with the Kanak rebellion in the French colony of New Caledonia, and in undertakings he gave to agents of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE),  when they visited him recently in Dubai.

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by Editor - Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

What can an employee of the Rupert Murdoch media machine and an employee of a George Soros think tank reveal in a new book about the evils of President Vladimir Putin which they and a foreign legion of thousands haven’t already said before – except that there is still money to be made out of repeating the story.   

Mark Galeotti, a writer for The Times of London, has been trying to live down his Italian Communist boyhood which is the only part of his story he doesn’t reveal or repeat.  Co-author Anna Arutunyan calls herself Russian-American,   leaving out the Armenian connexion at birth in Moscow, the circumstances of her growing up in the US, and some of the US institutions which trained and employed her,  including New York University, the Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian Institution, USA Today, and George Soros’s  International Crisis Group.  Americans who come to Russia as rookie journalists with backgrounds as blank as Arutunyan’s reveal they have something to hide.

Together, Galeotti and Arutunyan have just published what they call a history of the rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Not that they know anything directly about him. Everything they report has been published before, most of it in US newspapers and by US-paid Russian opposition propaganda organs. The sole source for their $10 billion estimate of the Prigozhin’s businesses in 2019  turns out to be two unknown fronts called Current Time TV and Municipal Scanner. The first acknowledges it is based in Prague and is funded by the US government propaganda agency, Radio Free Europe. The second, renamed The Scanner Project, says it was “created with the participation of Boris Nemtsov in 2014”.  That source of regime-change money appears to have run out a year ago, when the site stopped publishing.

As for Prigozhin’s time in criminal gangs; his hot-dog kiosks and restaurants in St. Petersburg; his Defense Ministry contracts; and his role in the formation and operation of the Wagner private military company, Galeotti and Arutunyan rely on second and third-hand hearsay; and the lack of ever having eaten in any of the top Soviet restaurants of Moscow and Leningrad, or their successors since 1991. Instead, the duo express contempt for everything Russian they have read about and have no direct experience of, including the Zhiguli car (“tacky duplicate of a 1960s Fiat design”), Soviet cuisine (“think of such delights as canned cod liver and meat in gelatine”), and the display of new (“obscenely rich”) Russian money — except for that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, because “he continued to bankroll opposition politicians  and speak out against corruption”.

They have just one direct source for the Wagner mercenaries. Arutunyan claims to have interviewed Marat Gabidullin, who has been selling stories of himself to qualify for asylum in France, where he moved in 2018 after serving in the Russian Army until 2015, and then in a Wagner unit in Syria for three years.

Gabidullin told National Public Radio of Washington, DC, in June 2022 that he left Wagner “because he became morally exhausted in Syria, fighting for a corrupt government that was hated by its own citizens. He says he was asked to fight in Ukraine but refused.”   A Ukrainian publication of 2023 claims Gabidullin “had a criminal record for murder.”  

From Gabidullin, Galeotti’s and Arutunyan’s book depends for insights and evidence like these he told Arutunyan: “It was like in that movie Casino. They come in, go to the closet, open it, load the money into bags, everyone else looks away”; “from the beginning , he had a  vision of [Wagner] being a global structure”; “Wagner is a typical serf-landowner type of business, with a diligent overlord who takes care of his peasants”.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 1st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

“The Russian Army stands for a moral defence of the country which [Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev] could no longer accept, either from Gorbachev or from Yeltsin. He said in his suicide note ‘I have earned the right to step out of my life’.   Now that is not possible except from a Russian Red Army officer…that is a special kind of political force now. Russian military honour, Akhromeyev’s honour,  is a political force, and once you’ve got an invasion of Russian territory, like Kursk, then the military imperatives take priority, not the oligarch priorities and imperatives.”

“We must accept there are internal pressures, significant constituencies, and some of them talk very volubly to US friends and they want to be loved by Americans. There is the oligarch constituency. There are serious political pressures inside Moscow because Russia is not a one-man state. It is a polity in which there are fundamental economic interests in ending the war quickly. The war is bad for their long term.”

“I don’t see that we are on the verge of World War III, militarily speaking. But we are already, I’m sorry to say, in World War III in every other sense, economically. The world is now broken into two major economic, financial, trading blocs. We are not in World War III for shooting. We are in World War III already for everything else.”

Watch or listen to the podcast with Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou.  

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by Editor - Thursday, August 29th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When is a politician’s state of being in two minds a sign of his trying to balance the views of competing constituencies or a sign of his indecisiveness, vacillation, weakness?

Since the start of the Kursk invasion on August 6, the argument in Moscow over what happened before and followed in the Kremlin, and what President Vladimir Putin has agreed will happen next is the most momentous debate in Russian politics since February 2014, when the Obama Administration pulled its putsch in Kiev; and then in January 2022, when the Biden Administration rejected Putin’s offer of terms for non-aggression and mutual security in Europe.

Don’t look for understanding of this debate from podcasting US military and CIA retirees or Ivy League professors whose service careers and promotions have depended on their misreading and mistaking Russian politics for thirty years.

Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio directs a special podcast to open the closed Kremlin doors and look past the Anglo-American propaganda.

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by Editor - Tuesday, August 27th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break  my bones but words will never harm me.

In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost.

But for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff.

The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forego the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian territory between Kiev and the Polish border,  and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk.

Call those terms Istanbul-II. As with the draft terms initialled in Istanbul at the end of March 2022,  Istanbul-II amounts to an exchange of dominant Russian military power for US and Ukrainian signatures on paper with false intention and  temporary duration.   

The US administration says it believes Putin will concede. It also believes that by staging its war of pinpricks — that’s the drone, artillery and missile barrages fired by the Ukrainian military, directed by the US and  UK – in the Black Sea and Russia’s western border regions,  Putin’s  red lines and threats of retaliation are exposed as empty bluff.  The same interpretation of Putin, and confidence that he will accept US terms, are the foundation of the Ukraine “peace plan” of Donald Trump’s advisors.  The Trump plan’s offer of “some limited sanctions relief” reflects the conviction in Washington that Putin’s oligarch constituency can be bribed to push Putin into the same “frozen war” concessions as Roman Abramovich got Putin to accept at Istanbul-I – until the General Staff stopped them both.

Putin’s restrictions on the General Staff’s proposals for neutralizing the US and British air surveillance and electronic warfare operations; and his orders to stand by while the Ukrainians have assembled several thousand forces, first to cross into Kursk, and then into Bryansk and Belgorod, are now as visible in Moscow as they have been in Washington.

Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack  on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. They understood the battlefield intelligence as it was coming in and requested Putin’s agreement to respond.  In retrospect,  they say “we told you so”; they imply their hands were tied by the Kremlin orders.

“My understanding for now,” says one of the sources, “is that these are pinpricks that feel painful but they are not life threatening. Russia will not take any land, for now, other than the four regions. It should be the eight regions but it’s obvious Putin doesn’t have the will and the military does not have the capacity to hold. So we will see Ukrainians inside Kursk for a while. But it should be downplayed because it should not be allowed to be a bargain chip in negotiations the other side is aiming at.”

Putin said this himself, the source points out at his meeting on August 12 with the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and others. “These [Kursk] actions clearly aim to achieve a primary military objective: to halt the advance of our forces in their effort to fully liberate the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, the Novorossiya region.”   Putin also said: “It is now becoming increasingly clear why the Kiev regime rejected our proposals for a peaceful settlement, as well as those from interested and neutral mediators…. It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future. However, what kind of negotiations can we have with those who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, or pose threats to nuclear power facilities? What is there to discuss with such parties?”

“It’s obvious at this point,” comments a military source, “that the Americans and Ukrainians have decided that Putin will come to terms if they snatch enough Russian territory and keep up  their strikes behind the Russian lines…The Ukrainians are going for broke in the north while the centre collapses. But they know, no matter how expensive it is, the longer they remain on the attack, the worse it looks for the Russian leadership. They also have the measure of Putin who gives orders for half measures.”

This is also obvious in the Security Council in Moscow. The Council’s deputy secretary, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev,  made the point explicitly in his Telegram account declaration on August 21, implying that until he had said it, no one else dared: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances;  for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences.” Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I. “After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”  

Medvedev’s reference to the “idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries” is to the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, whom Putin endorsed at the Kremlin on July 5 for the ill-concealed purpose of sending a message to presidential candidate Trump with whom Orban talked on July 10. For that story, click.   

Days before his meeting with Orban,  Putin had announced his abandonment of the demilitarization, denazification objectives of the Special Military Operation in exchange for “the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and from the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.”  

This change of objective has not yet been acknowledged by the Kremlin media; it is opposed by the Russian military and by the majority of Russian voters.    “War is war — either we go to war or surrender” – is a popular slogan on Russian social media for Putin to stop restricting the General Staff.

 “The problem for the Russians,” comments a military source, “is that they, especially the Kremlin, the Defense Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry  have lost the propaganda war. This puts them in a bad spot as they need more than stopping, then pushing the Ukrainians back in Kursk, or a Donbass victory, in order to recover. They need to knock the Ukrainians out of the war. But on that Putin says one thing — he does another.”

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by Editor - Monday, August 26th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Wherever you are, once you are in war, free speech doesn’t exist any longer. Truth telling is replaced by propaganda narratives enforced by censors and security services.

Between the truth and the propaganda there is that burst of 280 characters – 40 to 70 words – which was first invented in 2006 and is known as a tweet. This is published by the social networking company called Twitter Inc at the beginning, and now known as X Corp.  The company publishes hundreds of millions of tweets every day which the original inventor described as bursts of inconsequential information like the chirps of birds. That’s an insult to avian intelligence and the communicative skills of birds.

As for the Twitter and X corporation’s products, what’s been consequential for them is they have been loss-making for all but two years of their 18-year history. The company’s revenues have also been dropping for the past three years, so the losses have been growing.¹

This oughtn’t to be surprising once you learn that one tweet in every five is a fake which has been created, not by a single human being trying to communicate to another, but by a machine generating text automatically, or by groups of human beings using their machines to “peddle propaganda and disinformation to those attempting to sell products, induce website clicks, push phishing attempts or malware, manipulate stocks or cryptocurrencies, and harass or intimidate users of the platform.”²

Truth is an antidote, and there are many standards of truth telling. The two usually relied upon are the criminal court test for murder which requires the evidence to be credible beyond reasonable doubt; and the civil court test for fraud which is weighed on the balance of probabilities. In the time of the wars we are living through now, there is plenty of murder and of fraud, so both standards are recommended for judging every tweet.

However, there is a third standard –truth by retrospection. This is the clock test against which propaganda, no matter how persuasive at the start, is proved to be false by the elapse of time to the end. Was the Ukraine winning its war against Russia? – that tweeted question can finally be judged on the day after the regime in Kiev has signed the capitulation documents and accepted the loss of its armies and borders.

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by Editor - Monday, August 26th, 2024
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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 - Saturday, August 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The slogan on the 1960 Soviet poster by Kovalev and Godgold announces that to build your strength for work, the sun, air and water are necessary. That’s what we need in August.  

For clear head, a smile on your face, and bulging muscles by September, read the book before the new one is published.   

by Editor - Thursday, August 1st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

This F-16 flying above Lvov yesterday is not a Ukrainian operation against Russia, it is a NATO operation against Russia. In peacetime, this is as true as the sky is blue.

But to say so in wartime is a crime – in Berlin, Ottawa, Warsaw. Wherever you are, once you  are in war, free speech doesn’t exist any longer. Truth telling is replaced by propaganda narratives enforced by censors and security services.

In this broadcast by Gorilla Radio, the last surviving investigative radio in Canada, Chris Cook and John Helmer identify the bird in the air and the two in the bush for each of the breaking stories of the day. That includes the assassination of Hamas Political Bureau leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in his bed inside a presidential guesthouse in Teheran.

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 31st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Ignore the Anglo-American propaganda now circulating from Kiev that Russia’s military  has suffered a grave  military defeat in the Sahara desert, when Tuareg (Touareg) forces destroyed a Russian Wagner unit and Malian government forces in five days of battle at Tinzaouaten, on the desert border between Algeria and Mali.

“Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant battleground losses in Mali,” the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned propaganda agency in London, claimed in reporting from Kiev and Lagos (Nigeria).  “Graphic videos posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a sandy landscape strewn with dozens of bodies, some wearing Russian Orthodox crosses, and multiple burnt-out vehicles…Some pro-Kremlin military commentators have blamed the failure of the Mali operation on the clean-up imposed on Wagner after Prigozhin led an uprising against the Russian defence ministry last year. He died with several other Wagner leaders in a plane crash believed to be a Kremlin-directed assassination.”

The Guardian reported the source for a similar story to be an official of the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR) in Kiev.  Videoclips of the battle published on the internet carry advertisements for the Ukraine regime and appeals for donations.  

This is what the US, French and British propaganda agencies and intelligence services want readers, especially African and Arab readers, to think.

What has really happened is a different story. This is already surfacing in the Moscow press because the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and intelligence services want it understood that the Wagner men lost their lives at Tinzaouaten last week following a series of military mistakes driven by a strategic miscalculation which flies in the face of years of Russian diplomatic effort in the region. In a word, don’t fight the Tuaregs on their ground – negotiate with them instead.  

“We are against any unilateral steps,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s last official statement on armed conflicts in the Sahara had declared in 2021.  At the same time, the Ministry made the distinction between Islamic terrorism and anti-colonial national liberation movements. “We are assisting the G5 Sahel [Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger]…We are supplying these countries with the necessary armaments enabling them to strengthen their potential to eradicate the terrorist threat. We regularly train servicemen from those countries in the Russian Federation; we train peacekeepers and law enforcement officers at our Defence Ministry’s educational establishments…According to the available facts, our Western colleagues are not too enthusiastic about this.”

Tipping in favour of the Malian government like this has meant a negative Russian attitude towards the Tuaregs. Nonetheless, “the Tuaregs have lived there forever,” a Moscow reporter close to military intelligence reported this week. “Previous advances of the Wagner units in the liberation of Kidal and other areas of northern Mali do not cancel the fact that the Tuaregs are there in their thousands,  and this is their desert.”  

Marc Eichinger, a French expert on the region who has been based for seven years in neighbouring Niger, comments similarly: “You have Tuaregs from the same families on both sides and they hate the foreigners no matter who they are. They have a perfect knowledge of the landscape and it’s a big mistake to chase them in the desert. The French are happy not to be involved any more. You need much bigger means to fight them and if they feel at risk they just wait until the foreign army goes away.”  

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 30th, 2024
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