by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It was the English writer G.K. Chesterton who remarked that “compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.”

In the current war against Russian grain, less than half a loaf is what the European Union (EU) will get from its announcement last Thursday, May 30, of a prohibitive new import duty of €95 per tonne of cereals in order to ban Russian (and Belarusian) grain from entering the European market. Imports of oilseeds and derived products, as well as beet-pulp pellets and dried peas,  have also been barred.

In its official announcement,  the EU declared trade protection for the EU’s grain producers to be the main reason for the new sanction, not the Ukraine war.  France leads the EU grain producers, followed by Germany and Poland.

“The EU’s imports of grain products from Russia have significantly increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022,” the EU announcement said. “While the Russian Federation remains a relatively small supplier of those products to the EU market, it is a leading world-wide producer and exporter of those products. Given its current volumes of exports to the world, the Russian Federation could reorient significant volumes of supplies of those products to the EU, causing a sudden inflow from its large existing stocks, thereby disrupting the EU market.”  

For “disrupting the EU market”, read commercial threat to French, German and Polish growers.

The EU statement added “there is evidence that the Russian Federation is currently illegally appropriating large volumes of such products in territories of Ukraine, which it illegally occupies, and routing them to its export markets as allegedly Russian products. These measures will therefore prevent the EU market from being destabilised, halt Russian exports of illegally appropriated grain produced in the territories of Ukraine and prevent Russia from using revenues from exports to the EU to fund its war of aggression against Ukraine.”

In 2023 Russia exported 4.2 million tonnes of cereals and related agricultural products to the EU worth €1.3 billion. In volume, there had been a surge of 56% in Russian grain shipments to the EU from 2022 to 2023.  Notwithstanding, the proportion of Russian grain in the European market has remained less than 1%.  

The Kiev regime – currently barred from exporting its dumping-price grain to Poland and other neighbouring EU states  – has been complaining that Russian grain should not have an advantage in the market. The Defense Ministry in Kiev and the state-funded think tank of the Kiev School of Economics are the sources of the Russian grain theft allegation, which was first broadcast by CNN in March 2022.  US satellite and other intelligence was then used by CNN to repeat the Ukrainian allegation in May 2022. Just before, Reuters, the US propaganda agency based in New York, repeated the allegation, adding “the Kremlin denied Ukraine’s allegations, saying it did not know where the information was coming from.”  

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) repeated the allegation with additional state-supplied intelligence in June 2022, but the propaganda organ acknowledged that an uncounted tonnage of the allegedly stolen grain had come from Donetsk and Lugansk, after they had seceded from the Ukraine but before they changed their status from people’s republics to Russian regions.

The BBC also claimed that “part of the grain that ended up in these territories directly belongs to the Ukrainian state. These are the grain of state-owned enterprises and strategic reserves in case, for example, of a war that has actually begun.”  

After the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General’s office took over supervision of grain shipments from the Ukraine and Russia through the Black Sea in what was called the Black Sea Grain Initiative Joint Coordination Centre in the third quarter of 2022,  the grain theft narrative from Kiev stopped.

With Russian grain harvests running at record levels of 158 million tonnes in 2022 and 143 million tonnes in 2023, the volume of exports to the EU amounts to less than 1% of the harvest;  less than 3% of total exports.

This harvest boom has made Russia the western world’s leading grain producer;  globally, it comes third after China and India.  The Russian farm success has also been forcing down global grain prices. This, according to a western grain broker, amounts to “Russian wheat strangling global market.”     “Rising Russian exports,” the broker adds, “increasingly aggressive [lower] Black Sea export pricing, surplus global stocks, waning international demand and the prospect of another massive crop in Russia this year drive global wheat values to their lowest level since the second half of 2020.” Strangling the global profits of wheat exporters in competition with Russia is what this means – Australia, Canada, France and the US. In short, the Ukraine war allies.

At the weekly Moscow briefing which followed the EU announcement in Moscow on May 30,  Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova attacked the EU for hypocrisy in reducing market supplies and raising prices when it has been claiming its priority has been food security for the neediest grain-consuming states. “When the West begins to talk about prohibitive duties on Russian grain, I advise them to reconsider their own statements about food security, which they were insisting on two years ago,” Zakharova said. “From their point of view, everything was at stake in order to feed the countries in need. Are the same people, or is it their twins at the microphones, who are now saying exactly the opposite?”

“The Westerners lied two years ago. They had no interest in global food security. They just wanted to help fill the pockets of the major global players – mostly American, Anglo-Saxon companies – who were engaged in resale and made a huge fortune on margin. They used the situation of the moment, the political crisis in Europe, the world, and the situation in Ukraine in order to create opportunities for enrichment. It wasn’t just illegal. It was bloodthirsty. Now they’ve moved on to the next phase…The Westerners want to squeeze out Russia from everywhere. They hoped that our country end up destroying  its agriculture by joining the WTO and playing by their rules. That didn’t happen. Agriculture has been restored and feeds the world, fulfilling the capabilities of the Russian Federation and its natural wealth, responding to the call and obvious needs of various countries.”

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by Editor - Monday, June 3rd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It was a frustrated Sherlock Holmes who told Dr Watson: “You will not apply my precept,” he said, shaking his head. “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

That was in 1890 in the Arthur Conan Doyle story, “The Sign of Four”.

Application of this Holmes rule of detection and deduction to the circumstances of the crash of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter on May 19 is now producing the inescapable conclusion that Raisi, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian,  and the six others  on board their aircraft were killed by the actions of one or both of the pilots, who intended their own suicide and the killing of their passengers.

This appears not to have been the conclusion of the Iranian Air Force commanders who paid a condolence visit to the families of the pilots on May 21, two days after their deaths.  

But with the release last week by the Iranian Army’s General Staff of its second report on the fatal crash, the elimination of weather, machine failure, external missile attack, on-board bomb, electronic sabotage, and pilot navigational error is now complete. Together with the first General Staff report,    the detailed Teheran television interview of Raisi’s chief of staff, Gholam-Hossein Esmaeili,  and the eyewitness testimony by telephone from the crash scene by the Tabriz ayatollah,  Mohammad Ali Al-Hashem,  the evidence remaining is that the highly experienced chief pilot, Colonel Seyed Taher Mostafavi (lead image, right) made three mistakes — the first, to fly into the cloud bank after he ordered the others to climb above; the second, not to detect on his radar and other instruments the sharp mountain peaks in close proximity to his flight course at 2,200 metres; and the third, to crash in horizontal orientation, not vertically nose first.

Hattricks are rare, but they are never mistakes, never accidental.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 2nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte (right, centre) was the first leader of a NATO state to try to send his soldiers on to the Ukrainian battlefield to fight Russian forces directly.  That was in July 2014, in the aftermath of the Ukrainian shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. That Rutte scheme failed after it was vetoed by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel; she insisted on more time to prepare the NATO forces in the Ukraine to fight Russia. Now that they are, Rutte is the US candidate to become the new secretary-general of NATO.

For the first time, however, his appointment is being vetoed by a NATO member, Hungary, which has proposed an alternative candidate – the ethnic German Klaus Iohannis, who is  President of Romania. Because NATO rules require unanimity on the secretary-general, the Hungarian objection puts the Rutte nomination in the soup — make that goulash.

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by Editor - Thursday, May 30th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In war, exaggeration is a killer. In the media, exaggeration is a bestseller. In the current war there is a dearth of military and political analysts who for truth or money will tell the difference.

Instead, when the mentality of the war fighters is a combination of racial superiority and spetsnaz derring-do, what you get is the conviction that with one more brilliant operation and one more super-weapon, victory can be snatched from every indicator of defeat because the adversary will be persuaded to accept negotiations as he loses his nerve.

This is the meaning of the Anglo-American publicity which burst over the long Bank Holiday and Memorial Day weekend, as summer campaigning began in earnest for the July and November elections in the UK and US — with the incumbent in the former running 21 points behind,  and the incumbent in the latter trailing on an approval margin of minus-16 points.  

The Reuters propaganda agency, based in New York, is claiming to have found four Russians from “a senior level in the political and business worlds” to be talkative about what they say they know of the Kremlin’s end-of-war plans. “[President Vladimir] Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire – to freeze the war… Putin would, however, be ready to settle for what land he has now and freeze the conflict at the current front lines, four of the sources said. ‘Putin will say that we won, that NATO attacked us and we kept our sovereignty, that we have a land corridor to Crimea, which is true,’ one of them said, giving their own analysis.”

With just one more successful push from the Ukrainian side, Reuters and its four Russians believe, Putin will agree to give up his war.  This push,  which the western media have been amplifying this week,  is the drone attacks on Russian radar stations for early warning of nuclear missile attack at Armavir, Krasnodar, and Orsk, Orenburg.

  Although Russian military sources claim these attacks were pinpricks, and the second of them was shot out of the sky before detonation, western media are reporting that it is now the battle strategy of the US, the British, and the Ukrainians to provoke Putin into retaliation, crossing the red line of tactical nuclear warfare. That’s a red line, the allies are calculating, which Putin would rather negotiate end-of-war terms than cross.

A retired Moscow military analyst warns against the exaggeration, not of the attacks themselves, but of Putin’s power to decide end-of-war terms over the opposition of the General Staff and the new Defense Ministry. “It is obvious the Ukrainians have had a string of successful breakthroughs,” the source acknowledges, “– against ships, airfields, refineries, and now this radar site. We also understand it is not the Ukrainians: all target selection, identification, guidance, and the hardware are American or European. Where the command control of these launch sites is, we do not know but it might well not be in Ukraine.”

“But the Russian response will not be nuclear. That is impossible. There are a thousand options between doing nothing and going nuclear, and we can be sure the General Staff are working on all of them. So when people say this is provocation for a nuclear strike and that [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky is provoking it, we understand that, first, NATO planners know Putin will not go nuclear because he and his generals are too rational and sane. And second, Zelensky is not the one making the provocations. So the real red line now is not the nuclear arms provocations from the NATO side. That’s a fantasy of theirs. Just so, in response, I think it’s time Putin stops making threats and strikes at the source of these operations.”

When desperate weakness triggers battlefield fantasies, call this the Popski Syndrome.

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by Editor - Wednesday, May 29th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The release of fresh details of the fatal helicopter flight on May 19 which killed Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi, and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian is ruling out bad weather, machine failure, signals interference, on-board bomb or ground-fired missile as the cause of the crash. Iranian civilian, military and clerical officials are also excluding Israeli or US involvement.

Instead, Raisi’s chief of staff, Gholam-Hossein Esmaeili, a civilian lawyer and Raisi loyalist for many years,  has described a sequence of details, preceding and following the incident, which hint at suicide murder by one of the pilots of the presidential aircraft.

Esmaeili made his remarks on Tehran television on the evening of May 21.  He revealed that Raisi’s helicopter was flying second in a convoy of three aircraft, while Esmaeili was flying third, behind Raisi, when his helicopter “suddenly disappeared”.  The pilot of the third helicopter then “decided to circle and return to search for the President’s helicopter”.

Esmaeili also said that attempted calls to Raisi, Amir-Abdollahian, and the pilot of their aircraft,  Colonel Seyed Taher Mostafavi, all failed to produce a response. However, two calls were answered by Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Al-Hashem, the only passenger who appeared to survive the impact and fire of the crash,  but died soon after. Al-Hashem represents the clerical power in East Azerbaijan province. According to Esmaeili, Al-Hashem said “our situation is not good,  the copter has crashed into the valley”.

Al-Hashem’s remark appears to rule out a missile strike or bomb explosion.

Esmaeili’s statements rule out adverse weather conditions and the sight or sound of mid-air explosion.

An Iranian Army General Staff statement, issued last Friday May 24, after investigation of radar, radio, other telecommunications, and the aircraft debris, has confirmed normal navigation and  communications between the helicopter pilots and with ground controllers. “Gunshot wounds or similar ones have not been seen in the remaining parts of the helicopter,” the report claims, “in the conversations of the control tower with the flight crew, no suspicious cases have been observed.”   

The implication is also that there were no sudden machine failures triggering loss of pilot control and indicated by either pilot or automatic instrument distress signals.

Because the Raisi aircraft disappeared into clouds ahead of Esmaeili, and there was no heat burst from missile or bomb strike, satellite images by Russian, US, or Chinese satellites are unlikely to have recorded what happened. The signals intelligence collected by Russia and the US is also unlikely to have recorded more than Esmaeili has admitted.

That leaves the Russian hint published by Konstantin Malofeyev, owner and editor-in-chief of Tsargrad, citing a retired Russian Air Force general. According to Major General Vladimir Popov (retired), “the main threat to top officials during air travel comes from themselves”.    

The mainstream Russian press, the Moscow military bloggers, and RT, the state propaganda organ, have all avoided analysis of the incident forensics and speculation of motive; they have stuck to repeating official Iranian news releases. RT’s version  of Esmaeili’s statements is significantly shorter and less comprehending than the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) report  and the Times of India video.  

“Esmaeili’s statement points to Raisi’s pilot making the decision to crash,” comments a western military source. “Why order the other two aircraft to ascend and get above the clouds, and then not do so himself?”

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by Editor - Monday, May 27th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

A new press release in Ottawa reports that the court martial announced for Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Colonel Robert Kearney for his disagreement with Canadian, American, and British military planners of  Ukrainian battlefield operations against Russia may not proceed.

The Canadian government news slip reveals the allegations of disloyalty against Kearney announced publicly last month are now likely to be abandoned.

On April 29 a CAF press release was issued in Ottawa claiming that as a senior planning officer based in the UK and in Romania for Ukraine war operations, Kearney had made “derogatory and disloyal comments about Senior CAF [Canadian] and NATO [US, UK] members. The first offence allegedly occurred in December of 2021 and four subsequent offences ranged from January 2023 to November 2023. The offences are alleged to have taken place in the United Kingdom and in Romania.”  

Kearney was at the time of his “disloyal comments” the assistant chief of staff at the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) in Innsworth, United Kingdom. In this role, Kearney supervised more than 400 staff officers from the armies of the UK, US, Canada, Italy, Denmark, and other NATO states.

ARRC and NATO press releases claim Kearney’s unit has been operating against Russia in Estonia  and in Romania    “in its primary role as a war fighting Corps Headquarters.”  

Under Section 129 of Canada’s Defence Act – the provision of military law reportedly being applied against Kearney —  prosecution of soldiers is allowed for an undefined “act, conduct, disorder, or neglect to the prejudice of discipline”. The penalty for conviction is “dismissal with disgrace”, which includes loss of pension. This law has not been tested — no officer of Kearney’s rank has been charged and prosecuted for a Section 129 offence in a court martial before.  

Canadian military sources believe Kearney is being threatened with court martial now because the Canadian government’s policy to finance, arm, train, plan, and direct Ukrainian operations against Russia is being defeated; and that the military collapse east of Kiev now risks loss of more territory and the lives of Canadians currently working in the Ukraine and at cross-border bases in Poland and Romania.

At least one thousand Canadians have been counted by the Russian Defense Ministry on the battlefield since the start of the Special Military Operation; by March of this year, 422 had been confirmed killed in action.    

Loss of confidence in the Ukraine war has become increasingly public in the military staffs of the US, France and Germany, but this is being kept secret in the UK and Canada.

On May 15, a new Canadian government press release was issued acknowledging that, in fact, no charges have been filed against Kearney, and that the “military [have] yet to decide on court martial for the colonel accused of making derogatory comments about Canadian Forces leaders”.  

The new press release, issued ten days ago in an email to an Ottawa journalist, reversed the meaning of the earlier government announcement. The new message divulges that Kearney has been accused by officers he had criticized for their professional incompetence, but he has not been charged with a military offence.   “National Defence spokeswoman Andrée-Anne Poulin noted the charges against Kearney have now been referred to the Director of Military Prosecutions. ‘The prosecutor assigned to review the case will first complete the post-charge analysis,’ she explained in an email. If the prosecutor prefers charges, and once the counsel for the accused indicates they are ready to proceed, the case will be brought before the Chief Military Judge, at a scheduling conference.’ Once the dates for the trial have been identified, the court martial administrator will issue a convening order, and a summons to the accused, which will specify the date for the court martial, Poulin added.”  

Canadian lawyers point out that the conditional “if” and “once” in this defence ministry statement are a new sign that the political costs of prosecuting Kearney have become too high to proceed against him.  

A reporter named David Pugliese, who works for the Ottawa Citizen, has been the single source of the publicity against Kearney. According to his newspaper, Pugliese is “an award-winning journalist covering Canadian Forces and military issues in Canada.”  

A veteran with service in Afghanistan believes there has been an official cover-up of what Kearney has told his superiors during the Ukraine operations planning process, including warnings from Kearney of the future risk of Canadian casualties and military equipment losses. The source notes that no Canadian reporter has followed up on Pugliese’s publications. “I’ve seen nothing [else] on the Kearney case. Pugliese has allowed himself to be used as a tool, not only against Kearney, but against anyone else in the CAF considering speaking out against stupid and dangerous war plans and operations.”

Another Canadian military source says the Kearney case shows how weak Canadian generals and politicians have become now,  compared to their counterparts during World War II when Canadian General Harry Crerar successfully opposed British General Bernard Montgomery to claim  Canadian control over Canadian military forces and resist sacrificing Canadian troops in operations Montgomery was planning against the Germans in 1944 which Crerar told Montgomery were foolhardy.*  

Kearney’s supporters in the Canadian military are hoping that if the case against him collapses, he will sue Pugliese and the Ottawa Citizen for collaboration in defaming Kearney.

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by Editor - Monday, May 27th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

This year 2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my first two books in New York in 1974. To contemplate what to scribble next, I’m taking a few days of May break.

more later

by Editor - Monday, May 6th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Since last November the regime of Vladimir Zelensky (lead image, left) in Kiev has been advertising the products of a company called Piranha-Tech  for newly developed electronic warfare (EW) technologies which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu (right) is now supplying the Ukraine for operations against Russia.

According to a Russian military blogger report published on May 4, Israeli companies specializing in electronic jamming and drone technologies are behind a Ukrainian government, US,  and UK-funded drone production line and deployment of the weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield. Piranha-Tech, according to this source, is 49% owned by Israeli shareholders, who developed the technology, and 51% owned by Ukrainians who are managing the battlefield supplies. Piranha-Tech anti-drone guns and jammers  are based on Israeli military technologies, the report claims.

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by Editor - Sunday, May 5th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

A senior Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officer, who is the Assistant Chief of Staff at the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), faces court martial, “dismissal with disgrace”, and loss of his military pension for having disagreed with Canadian, American, and British military planners of  Ukrainian battlefield operations against Russia. His disagreement was in private, when the officers were asking for his professional assessment, and didn’t like what he told them.

Colonel Robert Kearney was charged by the Canadian military police on April 23.  The charge sheet says he faces “five (5) x counts of Conduct Prejudice to the Good Order and Discipline pursuant to section 129 of the National Defence Act.”  

Public disclosure was delayed by the Department of National Defence in Ottawa until Monday, April 29, when a press release claimed Kearney had been under investigation since another officer filed a complaint against Kearney last November. According to the ministry statement, the military police had “received a complaint of a senior CAF officer allegedly making derogatory and disloyal comments about Senior CAF and NATO members.”

Section 129 of the law refers to “any act, conduct, disorder or neglect”,  but it doesn’t define what “good order or discipline” means in the Kiev and Lvov bunkers where Canadians tell the Ukrainians what to do.  Canadian sources believe the law has rarely been used against an officer of colonel’s rank, and never in a court martial of an officer for warning that military plans risked loss of Canadian lives and resources.

Canadian military sources believe Kearney is being court-martialed now because the Canadian government’s policy to finance, arm, train, plan, and direct Ukrainian operations against Russia is being defeated, and that the military collapse east of Kiev now risks loss of more territory and the lives of Canadians currently working in the Ukraine and at cross-border bases in Poland and Romania. At least one thousand Canadians have been counted by the Russian Defense Ministry on the battlefield since the start of the Special Military Operation; by March of this year, 422 had been confirmed killed in action.   

“The timing of the alleged offences,” says a Canadian veteran who served with US and NATO units in Afghanistan, “was when the Germans took over command of NATO’s rapid reaction force which has been building up men and materiel, including heavy tanks and F-16s, in Romania for a plan to attack Russian forces around Odessa. Kearney’s court martial is a warning to his fellow officers not to object or predict destruction of the NATO forces engaged.”

“Kearney said things that clearly offended the top decision-makers in Ottawa,” the source says. “Criticizing the mission meant criticizing [Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia] Freeland  [lead image, left] and the UCC [Ukrainian Canadian Congress]. Criticizing how the mission was being conducted also meant criticizing the Americans and British. That’s what has drawn the charge of disloyalty.”

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by Editor - Thursday, May 2nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Following yesterday’s publication  on the work of Lawrence Freedman (lead image, left*), he was sent a request that “in the event you detect error of fact or interpretation in this piece, please inform me at once so that the appropriate remedy may be taken”.

A reply signed by Freedman has been received. The email address is Freedman’s institutional one which has been made public by King’s College, London; the IP address locates the origin of the email in Dublin, Ireland, through Microsoft.

Freedman replies:

“Seriously. What do you expect from me? This is all nonsense. I haven’t got the time or energy to go through it all. 

“But I do need to make it clear that I made no money by chairing KCL enterprises (because that was part of my job as a member of KCL’s senior management team), or from RAND Europe. I did not have shares in either (nor could have  had).  The idea that I used these bodies to monetize my expertise is just wrong as well as defamatory. Nor have I ever got anything from ‘All  American entertainment’, of which I was unaware until today although it does have a very old photo of me. You should also note that you fail to distinguish between free subscribers to Comment is Freed – by far the majority – and those that pay. It would be  great to have 40,000 paying subscribers – but we don’t.

“You appear to be deeply antisemitic – from your opening and that you find my son’s work with the Holocaust Education Trust to be sinister. 

“As for the rest I’m happy to defend the integrity of my analyses, past and current, but not with you.

“Instead of trying to show that I’m a terrible human being why not just acknowledge that you support a corrupt and criminal regime engaged in a catastrophic aggressive war against its neighbour and I don’t.”

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by Editor - Thursday, May 2nd, 2024
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