by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019.  

At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum. “Over 15,000 people attended the forum in St Petersburg,” Medinsky counted. “It lasted almost five days: it started earlier and ended later than scheduled… it was attended by 96 countries and saw the signing of over 90 international contracts for museum exhibitions, guest performances and exchanges…for the first time, and this is a very good trend, the forum was not just a club for cultural figures but also a place that attracted a lot of attention from the younger generation. Tens of thousands of St Petersburg students went to the forum.”

Putin said next to nothing: “Yes…Why?..Good…Very good…A very good festival, we need to cooperate with them…Good. Thank you.”  

Eight weeks later on January 24, 2020, the Kremlin announced that Putin had removed Medinsky from the culture ministry, and instead appointed him an assistant to the President. There were no other details in the official announcement;  nothing leaked then or later to the press on whether this was a demotion or promotion.   What is certain is that Medinsky’s talk of cultural events was camouflage. Putin had told Medinsky he was changing his role for one of the most personal foreign policy operations on Putin’s agenda.

This didn’t materialize in public until Medinsky appeared as the leader of the Russian delegation to negotiate end-of-war terms with the Ukrainian government in Istanbul between March 29 and April 1, 2022.  

Medinsky was sharply criticized by the General Staff, State Duma, and press for the terms he initialled in the draft agreement.   After these domestic attacks combined to reverse Putin’s support for the pact  and the Kiev regime appeared to withdraw under Anglo-American orders, Medinsky disappeared from view.  But he has retained the role of Putin’s negotiator in the preparation of a sequel agreement, Istanbul-II.

He reappeared publicly at the Kremlin on July 5, 2024, when Medinsky was listed by the Kremlin in negotiation of end-of-war terms between Putin and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, and through Orban, US presidential candidate Donald Trump.  In the Kremlin communiqué of the Orban talks, Medinsky was ranked ahead of foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov.   The Kremlin has not explained what the former expert on Russian culture and history was doing there. Despite evidence made public by Orban himself, the Kremlin has denied the discussion in which Medinsky participated was about terms for an end of the Ukraine war with the US, after the presidential election on November 5.

A Moscow source confirms Medinsky was identified to Orban as Putin’s personal messenger. “He remains the chief negotiator but he has not been seen with the Chinese or with the Indians. This means that Putin is only serious about Orban – of course not about Orban, but Trump whom Orban went on to meet in Miami on July 11.”

Then last week, on September 20, Medinsky reappeared again in public, this time – and for his first time – at a weekly session of the Security Council.  

According to the Kremlin communiqué, Putin began by announcing “we all know that in recent years, history has often been used as a means of achieving political goals with regard to our country. This is often done in an opportunistic and unscrupulous manner. As such, this can be viewed as a current policy issue, and our country, its official authorities need to define their attitude to it. Therefore, I propose that we discuss this today. We have two speakers, Mr Medinsky and Mr Lavrov.”  

What Medinsky had to say about Russian history remains top secret. His Security Council speech has not been quoted on the Kremlin website; the Kremlin’s Telegram platform has ignored it.   Asked for a copy or a summary of Medinsky’s remarks, the Kremlin press office replied:  “If we get it, we’ll add it. Follow the website”. So far as Moscow political observers can remember, this is the first time that an official statement on Russian history has been classified.

Russian sources believe the reason is the same as Medinsky’s November 2019 meeting with Putin. It is camouflage. Only this time, the sources add, Putin’s purpose is to expose the camouflage himself, confirming he is ready for Istanbul-II, and is employing Medinsky in the president’s effort to override opposition to the end-of-war negotiations from the General Staff and from the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, former president Dmitry Medvedev.

“Whatever Medinsky says is Putin’s thoughts exactly, more powerfully than Medvedev,” a Moscow source explains.  “Putin wants the Americans to understand this.”

By making public Medinsky’s presence with Orban on July 5, and now at the Security Council on September 20, Putin is sending a signal to Trump, and also to the Biden Administration, that they should reciprocate with a negotiating signal of their own and stop the Kiev regime’s plans  to escalate on the battlefield, with F-16 operations, and with long-range missile attacks on Russian territory.

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by Editor - Friday, September 27th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

A short break.

by Editor - Monday, September 9th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeated his promise to end the Ukraine war the day after his re-election with a bribe for President Vladimir Putin and his two pro-American constituencies, the Central Bank of Russia and the Russian oligarchs.

Applauded by an audience of New York lawyers and businessmen on Thursday afternoon,  September 5,  Trump answered a question from a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, Rodgin Cohen,  who asked if Trump “would strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions, particularly Russia.”

Trump replied that sanctions “ultimately kill the dollar and kill everything the dollar represents. We have to continue to have that be the world currency…I think that if we lose the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war. That would make us a third world country…you’re losing Iran; you’re losing Russia.China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant one…I want to use sanctions as little as possible.”

Instead, Trump proposed penalty tariffs on hostile-country trade with the US. “I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs…The biggest threat you have is that you lose that [dominant] currency, and we have lost something we can never get back…. If we win [on November 5], I believe I can settle that war while I am president-elect, before I ever get into office… Sanctions have to be used very judiciously. We have things much more powerful, actually, than sanctions – we have trade [tariffs] but we cannot lose our dollar standard. Very important.”  Minute 1:02-1:06.

The mainstream US media have not reported what Trump said. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post – all supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in their campaign coverage – ignored the Economic Club meeting entirely.   The Hill, a Washington-based publication for political specialists, headlined its report, “5 takeaways from Trump’s economic address in New York”, but the report didn’t include the sanctions proposal.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Sergei Kirienko, a former prime minister of Russia and currently the Number-2 man in charge of President Vladimir Putin’s staff, believes Russia can win the information war against the US and its allies.

In his meetings behind closed doors at the Kremlin, Kirienko has revealed that he thinks Americans are so trusting in their press like the Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News,  that if fake Post, CNN, Fox,  and other dummies of the US media can be created to report positive propaganda about Russia, instead of the negative propaganda these media usually run, Americans will be convinced to switch sides in the war to destroy the Russian army on the Ukrainian battlefield, and the war of US sanctions to destroy the Russian economy.

Kirienko also believes this can be achieved by spending less than $5 million of Kremlin money on an information war consultant named Ilya Gambashidze.

This is the evidence presented in a Philadelphia court this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an indictment for money laundering and trademark counterfeiting alleged against Gambashidze and his associates.  Without saying how the agency got hold of his records, the FBI has quoted at length from Kirienko’s remarks to Gambashidze “between April 2022 and April 2023…[in] notes relat[ing] to at least 20 Russian Presidential Administration meetings.”

During that time the FBI charges that Kirienko, Gambashidze and other Russian officials  decided to implement “foreign malign influence campaigns…designed to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters in U.S. and foreign elections by posing as citizens of those countries, impersonating legitimate news outlets, and peddling Russian government propaganda under the guise of independent media brands.”

The records of Gambashidze’s notetaking may not be authentic. Gambashidze may have misquoted, misrepresented or exaggerated what Kirienko told him. Gambashidze himself is quoted by the FBI as saying the evidence against him “is not completely true.”

The Kremlin has so far not responded.

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by Editor - Thursday, September 5th, 2024
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By Slobodan Despot, Montreux*
  @bears_with

The owner of Telegram, as far as we know, is still in France. The bird without a nest now lives with a police ankle tag on its foot. It is still unclear why he himself landed in the trap set. But we are beginning to understand how he thinks. The intelligence services too, no doubt.

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by Editor - Thursday, September 5th, 2024
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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.  

(more…)

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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