By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In war, the losing side has several options. Fighting to the death is one of them, capitulation and surrender are another. Depending on their rank, religion, honour, and offshore bank accounts, the losers may run away or commit suicide.

The Ukrainian regime, with the assistance of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) states and President Joseph Biden, have come up with an entirely new ploy. This is to escalate the combat, sacrificing all their troops and their equipment, and pretend this is winning — before they do a runner. Not even Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in their last days in the Berlin bunker, thought of this. But then Miami, Malibu, or the Côte d’Azur weren’t haven options for them.

At the current attrition rate on the front line, the Ukrainian army will have lost another one hundred thousand men dead and about three hundred thousand wounded by Christmas; their reserves will have been committed to the fight and exhausted; the army will have neither resupplies of  ammunition nor replacement NATO artillery and other equipment to fight on.  In desperation, if a final fight to the death is their option, President Vladimir Zelensky and  the Ukrainian general staff demand F-16 fighter-bomber aircraft. This means escalation to the use of tactical B-61 nuclear bombs.  These can be stored in Germany, Czech Republic, Poland or Romania, and loaded on F-16 aircraft there.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded directly on July 12:    “We have informed the nuclear powers — the United States, Great Britain and France – that Russia cannot ignore the ability of these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. No assurances will help here. During the fighting, our military will not understand whether each specific aircraft of the specified type is equipped for the delivery of nuclear weapons or not. The very fact of the appearance of such systems in the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be considered by us as a threat from the West in the nuclear sphere.”

Lavrov warned this may mean Russian nuclear pre-emption against either an attacking weapon, its launch pad, or its storage bunker.  

“The conditions for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons”, Lavrov said, “are clearly defined in our Military Doctrine. They are well known, and I will not repeat them again.   The use of nuclear weapons can be considered as a response option under one of four possible conditions. These include: ‘aggression with the use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia itself or its allies’, ‘aggression with the help of conventional armed forces that threatens the very existence of the state’, obtaining reliable information about the massive launch of ballistic missiles towards Russia and ‘the enemy’s impact on critically important state or military facilities of the Russian Federation, the failure of which will lead to the disruption of the response of the nuclear forces.’”

“Such threats to the Russian Federation in connection with the conflict in Ukraine are not currently being viewed [as likely], Russian officials have repeatedly stated. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed that the use of nuclear weapons is theoretically possible: ‘Nuclear weapons are being created in order to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state. But we, firstly, do not have such a need. Secondly, the very fact of reasoning on this topic already lowers the possibility of lowering the threshold for the use of weapons. At the same time, Vladimir Putin noted that he has a negative attitude to the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons as an element of nuclear deterrence.”  

These are the stakes. They have been well-known since Russia offered the US and NATO a non-aggression treaty in December 2021, two months before the special military operation began on February 2022.

 What is new now is that the Ukraine, the US and NATO are losing their war against Russia on the battlefield, and risk losing all the deterrence which NATO has been designing, building, buying, and deploying since 1949.  With or without desperation measures, Swiss colonel Jacques Baud tells War of the Worlds, Russia has already won the war. “Colonel Douglas Macgregor hasn’t this courage,” a US NATO veteran comments, referring to the Trump Administration appointee now broadcasting against the Biden Administration.  

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by Editor - Saturday, July 15th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For all its public talk, NATO has agreed on a secret six-month plan for Ukraine. It’s a case of do or die by December.

Either the Ukrainian forces, firing everything the NATO allies can give them — from US cluster munitions to Franco-English Storm Shadow missiles and German Leopard tanks — will gain territory and advantage over the Russians; or else the Kiev regime will be destroyed and must fall back on Lvov while NATO beats its own retreat westward from the Polish and Romanian borders — its military capabilities defeated but its Article Five intact.

This is hardly a secret. “Whatever is achieved by the end of this year will be the baseline for negotiation”, the Czech President Petr Pavel, former Czech and NATO army general, announced on the first day of the summit meetings in Vilnius.  There is no more than a six-month window of opportunity, Pavel added, which will “more or less close by the end of this year”. After that, “we will see another decline of willingness to massively support Ukraine with more weapons.”

The difference between the Czech’s “more or less” was explained to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky by Henry  Kissinger on the telephone. But the telephone was rigged, and Kissinger was talking instead to the Stavka in Moscow, in the guise of the pranksters Vovan and Lexus.

After justifying himself at length for initially opposing NATO membership of the Ukraine, and then mispronouncing the word “anomalous”, Kissinger acknowledged there is a problem for the Biden Administration to combat European government opposition to NATO membership for the Ukraine. The Ukrainians must fight against that, too, he implied. So long as the US is backing Zelensky,  it is necessary for the Ukrainian offensive to demonstrate small territorial advantages; abandon more ambitious ones (like Crimea); and only then agree to ceasefire talks.  Although Kissinger told Zelensky he had been speaking with US “military people”, he gave no hint that they had warned him the Ukrainians are facing defeat on the battlefield, and the loss of both territory and European support.  

The Russian General Staff calculation is different.

At the current rate of battlefield casualties – announced by the Defense Ministry counting conservatively — by December 31 the Ukrainian army will lose between 75,000 and 100,000 dead, and up to 300,000 wounded and out of combat. In parallel, the destruction of NATO weapons will accelerate faster than the NATO states can resupply and deliver them, or replacement parts to keep the surviving stock going at the front. By the time Russia’s General Winter takes control of the battlefield, there will be too few Ukrainian fighting men left, and insufficient weapons and ammunition, to resist the start of the Russian offensive. A demilitarized zone of mines and cluster bomblets will have taken shape over several hundred kilometres west of the surrendering Odessa, Nikolaev, and Kharkov; they will abandon Kiev when Kiev abandons them.

The Russian target then will be to drive what remains of the Ukrainian regime, its flags, tattoos, money, and stay-behind terrorism plans, into an enclave around Lvov. The NATO window, as General Pavel called it, will have been opened, but then will be closed to keep NATO itself from catching cold.

One of the  unreported outcomes of the  Wagner mutiny, and of the June 29 meeting in Moscow between President Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin,  is Putin’s commitment to fight for nothing short of the Ukraine’s rout to Lvov, and the NATO retreat westward in the footsteps of the Grande Armée and the Wehrmacht. This too is incomprehensible at NATO headquarters.

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 11th, 2023
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Translated from Colonel Cassad, with afterword by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Damage control

Today it’s a little funny to see the bewilderment from reports of Putin’s meeting with Prigozhin, because, they say, Putin had called Prigozhin a rebel, and then meets with him.

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by Editor - Monday, July 10th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the current war with the US, the monetary policy of the Central Bank of Russia and of its governor, Elvira Nabiullina (lead image, right), has been criticized in the State Duma and in the domestic media for catastrophic negligence in exposing the Bank’s currency reserves to the US freeze and seizure, which occurred on February 28, 2022.

The US Treasury described its action as a freeze. “This action effectively immobilizes any assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation held in the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located…The United States has not taken this action alone. On February 26, 2022, partners and allies committed to imposing restrictive measures that will prevent the Central Bank of the Russian Federation from deploying its international reserves in ways that would undermine the impact of United States sanctions and the European Union followed up with their restrictions last night. Our actions demonstrate global support for Ukraine and the commitment to hold Russia’s threatening, authoritarian rulers responsible for their heinous actions.”  

This was easier said than done. Finding the money in order to prevent the Russians getting their hands on it has proved unexpectedly difficult, especially in Europe.  

War between states, even the exceptionalist ones against the heinous ones, can be unpredictable  like that. The medium-term impact of the US action has been a multi-billion dollar outflow of US reserves by other states like China and Saudi Arabia, and a rise in the US Treasury’s costs of debt service, which will continue to grow with time.   

This was not Nabiullina’s intention in failing to shield the reserves and impose capital outflow controls when she had the time and warning to do so. Instead, she has made plain she is not a warfighter. Less plainly, Nabiullina allowed “four people with knowledge of the discussions” to tell Bloomberg she had offered her resignation to the Kremlin in her opposition to the war.  Officially, all she would say in a March 2, 2022,  pre-recorded video message to her Central Bank staff was “all of us would have wanted for this not to happen.”

More garrulous lower-level CBR staff told Bloomberg they were feeling “a state of hopelessness in the weeks since the invasion, feeling trapped in an institution that they fear will have little use for their market-oriented skills and experience as Russia is cut off from the world.” By skills and experience, they meant the endorsements they have craved – and Nabiullina has received – from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US system banks and funds, the World Economic Forum, and the Russian politicians who have promoted them and Nabiullina, Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin. This is a long story; follow the archive here.  

The lobbying against Nabiullina from the warfighting side, from the left economic policy side, and from the oligarchs who demanded low CBR interest rates all failed;  and on March 18, 2022, President Vladimir Putin nominated Nabiullina to a third five-year term. The State Duma confirmed the nomination on April 21, 2022.  

After the political failure of the campaign against her, wartime secrecy requirements have restricted the evidence of the Kremlin orders Nabiullina has been following, especially on the implementation of the capital controls which the Kremlin authorized at the same time as her reappointment. The reported capital outflow in January 2023 appears to be significantly lower than its postwar peak in July 2022, but higher than its prewar levels in January 2020 and July 2021.  

The oligarch loophole for capital export was opened by the June 9, 2022, presidential decree creating a secret Control Commission.    The Central Bank official in charge of the commission’s business, Yury Isaev, resigned after less than eight weeks in the job.  

Isaev’s exit exposed the gap — black hole more like — between what Nabiullina and other government officials say and what they do, and who gains in the process. As the Prigozhin affair demonstrates,  wartime secrecy not only protects Russia’s warfighting capacities, but also conceals many Russian incapacities, so speak.

In the report to follow, just published by Vzglyad, the leading Moscow platform for national security analysis, Nabiullina’s management of the rouble exchange rate is examined, the target of the current devaluation forecast, and the gainers and losers identified.

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by Editor - Sunday, July 9th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There’s no American anti-war movement in the Vietnam War, Syrian War or Afghan War sense of the term. That’s because there is a genuine US strategic interest at stake in fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, and further.  No comparable strategic stake existed in the earlier wars.

The stake in the war against Russia is the preservation of the US occupation of Germany and the empire in Europe and the UK, together with the credibility of US weapons which must be sold worldwide at prices to match their reputations in combat. Losing the war on the Ukrainian battlefield and in the sanctions war against Russia means a worldwide defeat for the US, its military power, its commercial and financial dominance, along with its command-and-control  systems, subsidiaries, and retainers.

The substitute for an anti-war movement in Washington is faction-fighting over what means, what terms can be devised to get the US out of the Ukraine before the Ukrainian army capitulates, Vladimir Zelensky flees for his life and fortune, and with them the collapse of the US alliance called NATO.

The apprehension of the allies in Europe was revealed a few days ago when Jacques Attali  answered a telephone call he thought was from former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, but which came instead from the Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus.  Attali,  French presidential adviser, US retainer,  and ex-head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,  said he knew French President Emmanuel Macron well and that Macron was afraid the US would abandon the Ukrainians to save itself. There was the same fear among the Germans and British, Attali added. “The weak point is what happens in Washington.”

“[This is] a nightmare scenario. That would be the US saying, well, enough is enough. We are not going to help Ukraine more. You have to go to negotiations, to the negotiating table. And that’s it. … Neither France, Germany or the UK can do that. But the US could arm-twist your [Poroshenko’s] government and your country [Ukraine] to say we want a ceasefire whatever it costs and stop [the war]. The most important thing is to avoid that.”  

“There is no other way than a total win and to get rid of Putin…We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise.”

This is the European allies’ last stand, their backs to the wall at the Dnieper River. It is the rationale for desperate measures on the battlefield, and at the NATO summit on July 11.

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by Editor - Sunday, July 9th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The calls have begun in Moscow, starting among the war blogs and battlefield reporters, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater damage than Prigozhin himself has caused.

In short, a Russian oligarch who knows too much, with too many mouths to feed, too many pockets to fill, and so too big to fail.

“There may be some reorganizations and a formal change of leadership,” Boris Rozhin, author of the Colonel Cassad media,  has announced. “The reason for the preservation is simple. Over many years of work, Prigozhin’s structures have grown so deeply into the state fabric that cutting them out at the same time without serious damage to the state is fraught with serious problems. That is, you can cut it out, but the consequences will be serious.” 

The war reporters are not the source of the first estimates from the Defence Ministry  indicating the trillion-rouble, multi-billion dollar size of Prigozhin’s empire, and the scale of the personal fortunes he, his close associates, and state officials have been accumulating for at least a decade.  No military analyst contacted for comment on the figures, will respond.

In the organized Russian political opposition, only the communist parties think differently and say so in public. Since the beginning of the special military operation they have publicly repudiated the pro-NATO line of the communist parties in Europe.  

The non-communist opposition in Moscow, led by Mikhail Delyagin  in parliament and Sergei Glazyiev   in government, has been vocal in their criticism of the Central Bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina; on Prigozhin they remain silent, refusing to answer questions.

Leading the open challenge to the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry is the Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP in Russian, CWP in English), a breakaway from the Russian Communist Party (KPRF); with 57 deputies and 20% of the national vote, the KPRF  is the leading opposition bloc in the State Duma; the CWP draws about 2% of the vote and has no parliamentary voice.   At the start of the special military operation in February of last year, the CWP gave qualified support, but made that conditional on what the goals of the operation would turn out to be.

“In our analysis and conclusions in these specific historical conditions, we rely on the analysis already made in the course of the development of the situation, including at the conference with the communists of Donbass, Ukraine, Russia in November 2019 in Lugansk. Once again, returning to the fact of the recognition of the republics of Donbass, we note that it happened, although late, much later than it should have, but better late than never. The RKRP not only supported this step from the very beginning of the proclamation of these republics, but also demanded that the bourgeois authorities of the Russian Federation take this step as an aid in opposing the People’s republics of Donbass to fascist aggression by the Kiev Nazis.”

“The goal of the strongest US imperialism in the world is to weaken the Russian competitor and expand its influence in the European market space. For this purpose, they purposefully worked to pit against each other not only the authorities, but also the peoples of Russia and Ukraine…We have no doubt that the true goals of the Russian state in this war are quite imperialist — strengthening the positions of imperialist Russia in the global market competition. But, since this struggle today to some extent helps the people of Donbass to fight back against Bandera fascism, the communists do not object to this objective,  but allow and support as much as it is being waged against fascism in Donbass and Ukraine… As long as Russia’s armed intervention helps to save people in Donbass from reprisals by the punishers, we will not resist this goal. In particular, we consider it permissible if, due to the circumstances, it becomes necessary to use force against the fascist Kiev regime, insofar as it will be in the interests of the working people…To die and kill for the interests of the masters is stupid, criminal and unacceptable.”

That was on February 24, 2022.  

Last week the CWP issued its declaration of “We told you so”. About Prigozhin and the  Kremlin, the party told its supporters, “there are no clean and honest people here and there cannot be.”

“These events showed that the bourgeois dictatorship has led the country to the decline,  not only of the economy, but also of the army and state administration, which, by the way, was what Prigozhin was talking about and speculating on. It should be said that Prigozhin himself is also an oligarch with a criminal past, who made his billions in a non-transparent way. Now it turns out that Prigozhin was simply competing for a more lucrative place at the feeding trough against other oligarchs. And he himself has understood perfectly well that if he were to find himself in power, he would pursue the same policy. That’s because practically everything in the politics of the bourgeois state is determined only by economic interests, simply put – the interests of profit.”

The KPRF has also issued statements, including a long interview with the Communist Party   leader-for-life, Gennady Zyuganov.  He doesn’t endorse the line of attack of the CWP.

Follow the arguments presented by the two Russian communist parties as they debate in public the meaning of the Wagner mutiny and the evidence of Prigozhin’s decade-long state capture. Excerpts have been translated into English from the longer Russian statements which can be followed in their original published form.

The partisan jargon varies from country to country, language to language. But nothing comparable exists from the democratic opposition parties of North America or Europe.

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russian regime change is war – it isn’t cricket.

Between the US, the UK, and Russia there have been regime-changing games for more than a century now.  Thirty years ago Boris Yeltsin was their big hit.  They have been bad losers since then. In cricketing terms, the Kremlin regime-changing plan of Alexei Navalny was a googly. The Yevgeny Prigozhin plan was a bouncer. Both have ended as ducks on the scoreboard.   

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns has telephoned Sergei Naryshkin of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to say Prigozhin wasn’t his batsman.  In a public speech to a British foundation of twelfth men, Burns said the CIA doesn’t play cricket. “This is an internal Russian affair, in which the United States has had and will have no part,” he claimed.  

If MI6 was planning and paying for these match failures, they need to pull stumps, leave the field.  

There are many Russians, however, who believe the Prigozhin affair, the dismantling of his business operations, and the associated clean-up of the Defense Ministry and Army, have upset  President Vladimir Putin’s confidence that his campaign for re-election in the presidential election in six months’ time will be unopposed. The Russian sources point out the shock of the events of June 23-24 is visible on the president’s face. A minority of sources believes he will retire from the race after finding a reliable successor.

“Earlier my sense was he was a sure winner if he won the war,” a Moscow source says. “But the victory is not cleancut and not in sight. I’ve believed that escalation on the battlefield would be a prelude to his retirement and that he wanted to leave a legacy of ‘no compromise’ with the Americans. But then he failed on that by keeping the old economic policy-Central Bank team.  Third, the war was a perfect opportunity for him to distance himself from the oligarchs and show clean hands.  These are three political failures. He is going to be like [former Kazakh president for life, Nursultan] Nazarbayev now.”

In Russian public opinion polling over the past fortnight there is no evidence that voter confidence in Putin has been shaken; nor in the Russian General Staff’s direction of the  battlefield.  General Patience  has been growing in Russian public support.

According to the independent Moscow pollster Levada Centre, “in May, almost half of our respondents (45%) were sure that the conflict in Ukraine would last at least another year – since May 2022, their share has more than doubled. Another quarter see the end of the ‘special operation’ no sooner than in six months. Meanwhile, more than the rhetoric of Russian politicians, it is the course of events that has convinced them of this.”  

What has just happened is that confidence in battlefield victory has slipped as a result of the Wagner mutiny. There was public support for the victory in the Battle of Bakhmut, and the role Wagner was advertised to have played in that. Prigozhin destroyed this support by his actions, including the shooting-down of Russian Army aircraft and the killing of its Russian crews.

Levada pollsters were interviewing a nationwide sample from June 22 to 28, and in the results they have been able to track the immediate impact of the armed rebellion as it began, unfolded, collapsed, and resulted in the dismantling of Wagner, and the exposure of Prigozhin as an oligarch-sized crook. “The attitude towards E. Prigozhin during the survey decreased by half: from 58% on Thursday-Friday [June 22-23] to 30% by the beginning of the working week [June 26],” Levada reported on June 29.  “In the future, we can expect a further decline in the authority of E. Prigozhin.”

If,  in the coming weeks,  the Ukrainians commit their reserves, along with NATO weapons in stock, and they are defeated as thoroughly as their offensive in June, Russian public confidence will recover. So will the slip in Levada’s measurement of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s public rating.

The constant is public approval of the president, which is holding above the 80% level of a year ago, and the conviction that the war is the US and NATO’s doing. Defeat on the battlefield in the Ukraine is understood by Russians to be the defeat of the US and the NATO alliance. The first ever.

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by Editor - Sunday, July 2nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday, June 30, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked if, after the armed mutiny of the week before, he can give guarantees that Russia is stable and will not sink into turmoil?

“We are not obliged to explain anything or make assurances,” Lavrov replied. “We are acting in a transparent manner…Russia has always emerged stronger from its troubles (and this is hardly more than a trouble). The same will happen this time. And, we already feel that this process is underway.”  

In Russian history the mention of a time of troubles — or as Lavrov put it, a trouble this time —  is a reference to the civil war between 1598 and 1613, when the Rurik dynasty of tsars was replaced by the Romanov dynasty. It was a time of Polish, Swedish and other foreign intervention aimed at installing a tsar pretender, a Russian ruling in the foreign interest.  Lavrov minimized his own reference as nothing of the sort.

At the same time former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy secretary of the Security Council, broke his week-long silence following the mutiny. As that was collapsing on June 24, Medvedev had said: “Now the most important thing for the victory over the external and internal enemy, hungry to tear apart our Homeland, for the salvation of our state is to rally around the President, the Supreme Commander of the armed forces of the country. Schism and betrayal are the path to the greatest tragedy, a universal catastrophe. We will not allow it. The enemy will be defeated! Victory will be ours!”  

On June 30, Medvedev reappeared to say that Russia has been watching the collapse of US rule under “a shuffling old man with acute dementia or a young, overgrown playboy with the habits of a provincial dictator”; followed by the “pandemonium and riots on the streets of France”. Medvedev then quoted the 19^th century writer Nikolai Gogol to say “‘there is only one decent person there: the prosecutor; and even that, to tell the truth, is a pig.’ However, if you recall another quote by Nikolai Vasilievich, it becomes quite sad: ‘I don’t see anything. I see some pig snouts instead of faces, but nothing else.’”

Where exactly was Medvedev’s reference to there? Whose were the pig snouts Medvedev was referring to — those of the outside enemies aiming to “tear apart our Homeland”, or the internal enemies, the leaders of the armed rebellion Yevgeny Prigozhin (lead image left) and the Wagner group founder and operations commander Dmitry Utkin (right), and their supporters?

Russian public opinion has been clear, and it has been intensifying over the years of President Vladimir Putin’s term until now, that the snouts they distrust most are those of the oligarchs. Prigozhin, Putin himself announced on June 27, was one of them as he ordered an investigation of the state funding of Prigozhin and the Wagner group. “I hope no one stole anything in the process or, at least, did not steal a lot. It goes without saying that we will look into all of this.”   

Why then did Putin spend the next day, on his first visit outside Moscow since the armed  rebellion, with the oligarch of Dagestan, Suleiman Kerimov? According to the Kremlin record, Kerimov participated with Putin in a discussion of tourism,  and then in a tour of the sights of Derbent, including the Juma mosque.  A report of the  closeness of Putin and Kerimov during the day appeared with open sarcasm in the Moscow business daily, Kommersant.  

Listen to this week’s TNT Radio’s broadcast, “War of the Worlds”,  as the Russian files are opened of the multi-billion dollar business Prigozhin created out of the state defence budget and Utkin turned into a private army with his own ideological bent.

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by Editor - Saturday, July 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Yevgeny Prigozhin (lead image, right) arrived at Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov, announcing to Lieutenant-General Vladimir Alexeyev that he was on his way Moscow to remove Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, Alexeyev told him “Go get them.”

Prigozhin didn’t take the road to Moscow. The thin column of Wagner men began to disperse enroute, while those who pressed on were stopped at the Oka River.  While Prigozhin was announcing, and western media megaphoning, that he had taken control of Rostov, Prigozhin didn’t know that Shoigu was in Rostov; controlled the city; and with the General Staff decided on the tactics which quickly scattered the Wagner forces, halted Prigozhin’s public relations campaign,and cut off his money supply.

For the General Staff, this was a tactic of giving Prigozhin enough rope to hang himself. He did.  The General Staff defeated him handily;  the military engagement was concluded almost bloodlessly. Politically, the General Staff won much more.

For President Vladimir Putin it was a replay of October 25, 2003. That was the day, at Novosibirsk Airport Mikhail Khodorkovsky (lead image, left), owner of the Yukos oil group, was arrested, charged with fraud, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy, and other offences. That story, and the reorganisation of Yukos under state control, are well-known. Prigozhin’s story is just beginning.

Putin has declared as much, with the apology that he hadn’t known until now. “I hope no one stole anything in the process or, at least, did not steal a lot. It goes without saying that we will look into all of this.”  

His spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, added the qualifier: “Putin has spoken about the quite significant sums that were allocated through the Ministry of Defense. He called out these figures, but the company was also engaged in its own business, which has nothing to do with the state.”  

From his exile in London, in a publication sponsored by The Economist,  Khodorkovsky declared Prigozhin to be a “thug and war criminal”, but notwithstanding, “truly a revolutionary”. “Only an armed populace can topple this dictatorship”, Khodorkovsky said as he made his appeal for British and NATO support for military intervention across the Russian border, all the way to Moscow on Abrams, Challenger and Leopard tanks. “The West should bet big on Russia’s democratic opposition and grant it agency” – by “agency” Khodorkovsky meant a seat for himself inside the lead tank.

This is the end of MI6 and CIA funded regime-changing tactics of Alexei Navalny, the Khodorkovsky manifesto signals.  “Regime change is coming…[but] only an armed populace can topple this dictatorship… we must not only support the toppling of the regime but also be ready to asset our democratic interests through force when it falls.”  

This is the familiar  枪杆子里面出政权 – Mao Zedong’s slogan, “political power out of the barrel of a gun”.

To save himself under house arrest in Belarus, Prigozhin has appealed to Putin for release: “we did not aim to overthrow the existing regime and the legitimately elected government.” Prigozhin also wants cash back “so that PMC [private military company] Wagner would continue to work in a legal framework.”

Putin’s answer has been to delegate the political power to the barrel of the gun; that’s the General Staff. The investigation of Prigozhin’s fraud, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and other offences go now to the security services, the Interior Ministry, and state prosecutors. “I extend my gratitude to you,” Putin told a parade inside the Kremlin of personnel representing the army, National Guard, the Federal Security Service (FSB), Interior Ministry and the Federal Guard Service, “for your service, courage and valour, for your devotion to the people of Russia.”  Two hours later he told Defense Ministry officers: “you and your comrades had a special part to play in this. Special words of gratitude go to you…Once again, thank you for what you did for Russia, for the country and for our people.  

Putin’s past tense is also the future tense.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For more than twenty years – that’s from the beginning of President Vladimir Putin’s term in office – the residents of Chelyabinsk have believed in the romantic story of how truth would triumph over deceit, law over criminality,  in their battle to breathe the city air, drink the city water, and eat the produce of the city’s earth – most of it polluted illegally by the oligarch named Igor Zyuzin and the steel, coke and coal conglomerate he owns called Mechel.

In this archive of eighty-three reports,  beginning in 2005, the methods have been investigated by which Zyuzin has won the battle, including what Russians call the “administrative measures”, to protect his industrial pollution all these years, and the names of those responsible.  The most recent of these reports appeared just two months ago.  

Everyone in Chelyabinsk believes this story ends in tears — and from the medical angle, much worse. This is how the story of the deceit was told last week.

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by Editor - Monday, June 26th, 2023
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