By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A quarter of a century ago, President Vladimir Putin explained to President George W. Bush the way the warfighting world really works.

“There is a contradiction between a new, young, aggressive financial Islamic capital and the old one,” Putin said.  “In reality, it is a financial issue. Religion is secondary. The real goal is to have a place in the centre of world finances, a place that is already occupied. They want to push away representatives of Jewish capital or, if not, they will try to destroy the centre and shake it up and, ultimately,  in that way to take its place. The reason for the terrorism isn’t the Middle East or poverty. They use poverty and they use unresolved conflicts. They are using other problems. These problems are not the real reasons for terrorism…I raised this not just to support you, but to say that we all have fight in the same world.”

By Jewish capital, Putin was repeating the line he remembered from his Marxist-Leninist textbooks in which the capital of Russia’s enemies in Europe and the US was inter-connected and in which the ideology of religion always reflected the underlying class struggle between capital and labour.   So far as is known, Putin hasn’t acknowledged as much at his meetings with Steven Witkoff (lead image left, with Kirill Dmitriev) and Jared Kushner. Nor has he said that the US-directed attacks on the Russian hinterland, including his own residence in Novgorod, are anything but terrorism.

Putin has also not described the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza as an enterprise of Jewish capitalism on to whose board of directors, the Board of Peace (BOP), Putin was recently invited to sit by the chairman, President Donald Trump. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has advertised the invitation which has been sent to more than fifty countries.  “President Putin has indeed received an offer through diplomatic channels to join this Board of Peace. We are currently studying all the details of this proposal. We hope to contact the US side to clarify all the details.”  

This wasn’t a Russian nyet. It wasn’t the explicit endorsement of Trump’s invitation as a political compliment – the line Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko took when he received his summons and accepted with alacrity, claiming it was US “recognition of Belarus’s international standing and Lukashenko’s personal role.”  

When Peskov was asked again, he said it is still “premature” to say Putin will join the BOP. “We do not yet know all of the details regarding the initiative on this board, whether it concerns only Gaza or includes a broader context,” he said. “There are a lot of questions about this initiative so far, and we hope to receive answers during contacts with the Americans.”  A Moscow supporter of the Kremlin has claimed  Putin’s acceptance could be “for the simple purpose of not wanting to provoke Trump by risking him being offended by Putin’s rejection of his invitation into escalating. A supplementary motive could be that this is a political insurance policy in the scenario, however far-fetched it might seem, that the Board of Peace ultimately de facto replaces some of the UN’s functions.” 

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid in Teheran, the focus is on the evidence of Russian responses to Trump’s moves from Putin, his Kremlin advisors, the General Staff, and the Foreign Ministry. The big question, illustrated with tables, maps and charts, is whether Russia is capable of projecting the military dominance it has won in the Ukraine to the new battlefields and fronts Trump and the European allies are opening from the Caribbean to the Atlantic, from Cuba to Greenland.

The corollary, also discussed, is whether Putin will decide to advance his military power,  temporize, or retreat, according to the interpretation of the allies, China, Iran, and India.

A well-informed Moscow source warns against exaggerating Trump’s exceptionalism. “I think Trump’s aggression is a repeat of George Bush Junior’s aggression, which was followed by Obama’s proxy wars and regime changes. All of that followed the wars of Bush Senior and Clinton, Serbia in particular. We don’t let Trump’s ego blind us to the continuity of American neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism in full force. The chances of a direct military conflict between the US and Europe are exaggerated. In reality, they will realign together in their common war against Russia. Their public rhetoric and propaganda are a matter of timing in the  election cycles.”

Click to watch or listen.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Revealed for the first time in public is that President Vladimir Putin believes that international terrorism of the radical Islamic type is not the result of Middle Eastern conflict or of regional poverty or of Great Power proxy warfighting. Rather, he thinks it is a form of competition of the Marxist-Leninist type between Islamic and Jewish capital. At least, that’s what Putin told President George W. Bush when they met in China in October 2001.

Also revealed is the consistency of Putin’s three-step method for dealing with US presidents — first by ingratiating them personally;  then by lecturing them with lessons on history, economics, and strategy; and lastly by offering unilateral concessions in return for promises of US benefits to follow.  

As the releases of declassified records for the George W. Bush presidential archive continue,    the evidence mounts that this method of Putin’s is the one he is repeating today with President Donald Trump.

The new evidence is that Putin’s method is a repeated failure. One reason for this is confirmed in the new documents from the Bush archive — US presidents never do what they say. This is American deception.

The second reason is that the understandings Putin reaches with US presidents are those Putin has in his head – they are never those in the American heads. This is Russian self-deception.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On his way to meet Joseph Stalin in July 1941, Harry Hopkins (lead images, left) landed just out of range of German guns on a Moscow city airfield which, later, stretched a few hundred metres from my kitchen window.

In Washington, DC, in 1976, his daughter Diana Hopkins (centre) sold her house to become my home, making a gift of some of her father’s books.  For these reasons, among others, I remember him.

This month it is the eightieth anniversary of the death of Hopkins who died in Washington on January 29, 1946; stomach cancer was the cause; he was only 56.

Hopkins was President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal negotiator during World War II with the allies; he was the only American recognized by Stalin as both honest in what he said and honourable in his intentions. По душам, Stalin said of his conversations with Hopkins – heart to heart.  

No American in the eighty years since then has been regarded by Russians in the Kremlin in the same way and to the same degree – not the deceptionist Henry Kissinger, and certainly not the corruptionists Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Honour between the Americans of the White House and Russians of the Kremlin ended with the coup d’état which placed Boris Yeltsin in power for a decade. The US war which has escalated since then makes the recovery of honour between the representatives of the two Great Powers impossible.

Russians who say otherwise aren’t deceiving the deceivers. They may be fooling themselves.

When the combination of Bloomberg and Tass announced on January 14  that Witkoff and Kushner will make “a forthcoming visit to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin” , Tass added the conditional that if President Donald Trump launched an attack on Iran, Witkoff and Kushner “may be postponed due to ongoing developments in Iran.” 

Adding more conditionals, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has intimated that nothing they say nor any negotiator for Trump nor Trump himself, is worth flying to Moscow to say, or for President Vladimir Putin to open the Kremlin gate to hear.   

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by Editor - Thursday, January 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For roughly half a millennium crows have come together in murders; foxes in skulks; cats in clowders; lions in prides; toads in knots; kangaroos in mobs.

Podcasts appeared by name roughly twenty-one years ago,   and since then the medium, primarily a US one, has experienced a phenomenal rate of increase of listeners and viewers,  concentrated in the audience which is less than 35 years of age, with more college education than average, and whiter. Most of this audience reportedly watches and listens at the same time.

For the time being, the collective noun pod applies to peas and whales, not yet to podcasts. Whales think but don’t read; it’s not yet certain that in the pod of podcasts, reading has been replaced, but the younger the audience, the more this is happening.

So here is a Christmas-New Year holiday experiment – the pod of podcasts aired since December 25 without a Dance with Bears to read beside them.

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by Editor - Thursday, January 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be,  a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that kind is more than foolish, I claimed – it’s dishonourable. Exactly what duty meant to those around the table at the India Foundation in Delhi was left unspoken.       

I was corrected by a French colleague who pointed out that while politically or militarily speaking, it is  possible to give up this hope, in French named espoir, it is much graver now to lack espérance.  

That’s the virtue which in the medieval allegory of Alain Chartier (lead image), he fought with the monsters he called Melancholy and Despair, and by opening a very small window Chartier named Memory, he defeated them.    

Chartier was writing between 1428 and 1430; that was 91 years into the Hundred Years War, and 23 years before it ended; Chartier was dead by then.  

For Russians it is now 108 years since the war with the rest of the world began with the revolution of 1917. The German monster then is fighting still.

He’s not the only one on whom the window of Memory is opened to expose. After the new book-writing of January, we will return to do more of that.  

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Pejorism is the idea that the world is getting worse so you should prepare yourself, your house, your country, your army.

Meliorism — the opposite idea that the world is getting better, that time and history are on your side, etc. — has been so powerful for so long that it has suppressed the skeptics and buried pejorism. The term doesn’t rate an entry in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. The digital version of the full Oxford Dictionary  claims the idea, or at least this word for it, is a modern one even if it is based on the ancient Latin word peior which described the condition of comparative degree between malus (bad) and pessimus (worst).  

In the war of civilizations in which Russia finds itself with the US, Germany, and the NATO allies, and also in the war for the sea lanes and freedom to trade, the longest lasting ally Russia has had is India. In this hour-long discussion with Lieutenant General P.T. Shankar and Brigadier General Arun Sahgal, the former a specialist of artillery, the latter of intelligence, we discuss the issues that were addressed during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Delhi earlier this month, and the problems to be solved by the two allies in the year ahead.

Click to view or listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n4Xb3rWa3w  

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by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the time being the Trump Administration and its allies conduct their war against Russia on the high seas, outside defended territorial waters, against ship targets which are unarmed, threaten no resistance. This is piracy, effective if the sight of the skull-and-bones flag triggers fear, shock, immediate surrender.

In the Caribbean against Venezuela, President Donald Trump is displaying an enormous naval force:  “the largest Armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” he tweeted on December 16.  “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before”.  

Then the US Coast Guard announced that it lacks the men and firepower to board and seize the Bella-1 oil tanker, owned by China and heading to Venezuela to load crude oil for delivery to Chinese refineries. “The days-long pursuit [of the Bella-1] highlights the mismatch between the Trump administration’s desire to seize sanctioned oil tankers near [sic] Venezuela and the limited resources of the agency that is mainly carrying out operations, the Coast Guard,” a US official announced on December 23.  “A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Coast Guard officials on the [USS Gerald] Ford were from a Maritime Security Response Team and at the time too far from Bella 1 to carry out a boarding operation.”

The next day, December 24, Trump officials lowered their flag to half-mast. “The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a ‘quarantine’ of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters, indicating Washington is currently more interested in using economic rather than military means to pressure Caracas.”  ‘While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),’ the official said on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

In the Mediterranean, the cover story for drone attacks on tankers operating for the Russian oil trade is that it’s the Ukrainians at work, reportedly firing from 1,500 kilometres to the north.

More certainly, the small drone detonation  on the deck of the Qendil southwest of Crete on December 19 was fired from Tympaki, a Greek Coast Guard base on Crete armed with Israeli and NATO drones and using US and NATO satellite and live airborne electronic surveillance. Although claimed by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) , this was an act of war by the Greek Government against Russia – and it failed. The Qendil has continued under its own power through the Aegean to Nemrut Bay, Turkey.  Omani-flagged, with Indian management and a Russian master,  the Qendil  was empty at the time of the attack.  

This is a war between the 3,300-tanker alternative fleet (alt-fleet) versus a mainstream fleet of about 5,000 vessels  in which the world oil tanker market has been cut in half by the international war between Russia, China, India, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea on one side, and the US, the NATO allies, Israel,  and Japan on the other.  

At sea, for the time being, this is a war of provocation,  profiteering,  and face-saving short of shooting. The more time that goes by, however, the stronger the Venezuelan government grows in resistance, and the closer to capitulation the US and NATO-backed regime in Kiev.

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by Editor - Thursday, December 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In an unusually frank analysis of the General Staff’s electric war campaign since 2022, Vzglyad, the semi-official platform for security analysis in Moscow, has acknowledged that three years of strikes against Ukrainian energy targets have fallen short of their military objective because the targeting has been restricted by President Vladimir Putin’s tit-for-tat order.

But now that order has changed. Or has it?

Ukrainian military bloggers were reporting on Tuesday afternoon (December 23) that “as a result of the morning strikes of the Russian Armed Forces, the Rivne, Ternopil and Khmelnitsky regions of Ukraine were completely de-energized. There is a risk of disconnection in Vinnytsia, Chernigov, Zhitomyr, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov regions.”   The capacities for repair and replacement of damaged  energy facilities have “almost dried up”, they add.   

If this is the current situation, does this mean that the successive waves of electric war operations – October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024  — failed in their cumulative impact?

Answers a veteran military engineer and specialist in electric warfare:  “The electrical spare parts coming from Europe via rail could have been stopped. The yards containing spare transformers, service vehicles and equipment could have been put out of commission; multiple high-voltage cable towers — easy targets! — could have been hit at the same time.  Coupled with strikes on the substations, service equipment yards and supply logistics, such a campaign would have quickly overwhelmed the Ukrainian capacity to effect repairs in anything resembling a timely fashion. Why hasn’t this happened, or why is it, apparently, happening only now?”

“Can you imagine the war continuing if the 33 main Ukrainian electrical substations and the towers carrying the lines to and from them had been destroyed in the autumn and winter of  2022/23? If the railways from Poland and Romania had been de-electrified, had their rolling stock and engines smashed? If the rail and highway bridges carrying Ukrainian re-supply had been bombed?”

“Unless the decision-makers in the Kremlin are stupid,  which we know they are not, striking again in 2023, 2024, and 2025 without finishing off the Ukrainian electrical grid can only be explained as a political decision – that’s to say, President Putin’s decision.”

In Moscow on Tuesday, this is publicly admitted for the first time, albeit by inference between the lines and under a byline that is fake.

Vzglyad, the state-funded publication of military, intelligence, security and economic analysis, headlines its report with an irony — “Zelensky’s stubbornness is finishing off the Ukrainian energy industry”. The text which follows makes clear that stubbornness has been a problem from the beginning of the electric war – not in Kiev but in Moscow.

Note that unlike most Vzglyad reports, no source has been cited by the author, Nikolai Storozhenko. No trace has been found of this name as an active writer for Vzglyad. The name belonged famously to a literary historian and Shakespeare scholar in Moscow in the mid-19th century.   The use of such an obvious alias carries the invitation to knowing readers to understand this as a semi-official editorial.

Click to read the Russian original.   

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The official record of three conversations President Vladimir Putin (lead images, right) had with President George W. Bush (lead images, left) in 2001, 2005, and 2008 has just been released in Washington.

This follows a federal court lawsuit to compel the US National Archives to speed up the declassification process which was initially to have ended in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, and which the Biden Administration then attempted to block for another decade.  A lawsuit, filed in November 2024, identified 19 separate face-to-face meetings between Putin and Bush, and 73 telephone calls over Bush’s two terms, 2001-2009.  

Stonewalling by the National Archives and the White House ended with the release of documents early this month. Three texts have been released and can be read in full here.   Other records, including telephone calls, are expected to follow.

The hitherto secret remarks of Putin are almost identical with what he was saying at the time in public, and what he has subsequently said in opposition to the US plans to make the Ukraine a platform for NATO threats to Russia.

Equally unsurprising is the record that Bush made of his readiness to listen to Putin, and also of his evasiveness and misrepresentation in response – amplified at the time by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Yury Ushakov, then Russian Ambassador to the US, were present at the second and third meetings, the record shows they had less than their counterparts to say – that is, next to nothing.

Read in retrospect since Putin has negotiated strategic partnership and defence agreements with North Korea in 2024 and Iran this year, Putin’s negative references towards the North Korean and Iran leaders he had met are noteworthy. “There may be a lot of nuts there”, Putin said of the North Koreans in 2005, “but not everyone is.” About the Iranians, whom Bush called “religious nuts with nuclear weapons”, Putin responded: “They’re quite nuts…They may be crazy in their ideology, but they are intellectuals…That was quite a surprise to me.”   

Putin added a qualifier. He believed North Korea’s policies, he told Bush, were the result of the security threats imposed by the US and its ally South Korea, and that no change could be expected until and unless these were lifted. “The North Koreans live in more seclusion than we lived in,” Putin said.  “They are more isolated than the Soviet Union under Stalin. The overwhelming number are prepared to die. This is not East Europe or East Germany. For any serious change in mindset, there needs to be rapprochement between the North and South.” Bush did not reply.

Putin’s response was different when Bush told him Iranian nuclear weapons technology was “scaring” Israel. “The military option stinks,” Bush claimed, referring to Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment operations. “But we can’t take it off the table. [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is thinking about the military option. If you or I were Sharon, we’d be thinking about the military option. Iranian nukes really scare the Israelis. Diplomacy must work. That’s an important point to keep in mind. If Sharon feels he needs to strike Iran, all hell will break loose. I’m not saying it will happen, only that the most likely military reactions will come from Israel.”  

Putin is evasive. “But what will they target?” he asks.  Left unsaid is that Putin conceded that  Israeli nuclear weapons threatened Iran with US support, and that he accepted that US would  support Israel to attack Iran’s counter-deterrent. Putin did not tell Bush that until and unless the US and Israel lifts the nuclear attack threat against Iran, there could be no reciprocal security although the Iranians, like the North Koreans, had told him exactly that.

This is telling with the hindsight of Putin’s acquiescence in Israel’s June 2025 attacks on Iran during a telephone call on June 13 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,  and his response to Trump’s bombing of three nuclear technology sites on June 23.  “Who says we should have done more,” Putin declared on June 20, “— what is more? Starting some kind of combat operations, or what?”   

Twenty years earlier, on September 16, 2005, Bush had told Putin: “But we aren’t doing the targeting for Israel”.  Putin knew then Bush was lying; Putin prevaricated. “But it’s not clear what the [Iranian] labs have, where they are. Cooperation with Pakistan still exists”, Putin went on, attempting to get Bush to respond on US military and intelligence assistance to Pakistan.

Bush was evasive.  “I am concerned about Pakistan,” Putin said. “It is just a junta with nuclear weapons. It is no democracy, yet the West makes no criticism of it. Should talk about it.” Bush didn’t want to, so Putin asked Bush about the problem of terrorism spilling out of Afghanistan to attack both Russia and the US.  “What should we do about the Taliban? I asked Clinton but never got back a straight answer.”

Bush was evasive again. “Armitage [Deputy Secretary of State] and George Tenet [CIA Director] have my full cooperation”. Putin replied: “Perhaps now, after your elections [November 2006], there will be fewer games.”

There weren’t.

Five weeks later, on October 29, 2005, the Pakistan-directed terrorist group  Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) bombed crowds in New Delhi, India, killing 67 and wounding more than 200.

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the International System of Units, hertz is a unit of frequency for measuring the number of times a repeating event occurs per second, like waves, cycles or vibrations of pitch, sound, or electrical current.  The common multiples are kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz.

Merz is the unit measuring the number of times German politicians and soldiers repeat the mistake of thinking themselves so superior to the Slavs or Russian race, they will be able to defeat them in war.  The name in German for the gigamerz multiple is Friedrich (lead image).

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we go over the evidence that the drone attack on the Qendil  oil tanker off the south coast of Crete was a US-NATO operation disguised to look like a Ukrainian one. Then we discuss the implications for the European states and the UK in the escalation of the war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield to the high seas – from the Meditearranean to the Baltic, Atlantic, and the Caribbean.

Click to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEk86o9–I 

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by Editor - Monday, December 22nd, 2025
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