by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

All’s fair in love and war – this  is a 500-year old English proverb but it isn’t in the Geneva conventions on war crimes and genocide, much as the US and US-backed Israel claim it is.   

In the war of US, NATO and their Asian allies against Russia, it is turning out that almost all the major companies on the enemy side love Russia too much to leave.

They also think Russia has won the war, so they are convinced — the executive managers,  boards of directors, control shareholders, and bankers — that there is no point in leaving. So they continue to do business in the Russian market profitably, while they wait for the military defeat of the Ukraine and their own governments to register, and the terms of capitulation allow them to tell their shareholders, “we told you so.”

That notice will be delivered with a dividend paid out of the profits the companies continue to earn from their Russian businesses. The shareholders will be satisfied with both; they will vote their confidence, with a bonus, for the chief executive and board at the next Annual General Meeting.

Two studies on the enemy side, one by the Kiev School of Economy’s (KSE) “Leave Russia”  and “SelfSanctions” projects, and a follow-up by the Russian-language publication Novaya Gazeta Europa have reported results of their surveys of 110 international firms working in Russia. This is fresh evidence of the defeat of the enemy in the economic war — from the foxhole of the enemy.

The survey results demonstrate that after two years of intense pressure and threat campaigns by the US, NATO and the Ukraine for the companies to wind up their Russian businesses and leave  Russia, the outcome is defeat.  

KSE claims this work has been done by “a team of Ukrainian IT volunteers;” the Yale University’s School of Management collaborated with data on the companies. Volunteer doesn’t  mean what it seems in Ukrainian. The funding for the operation has come through KSE’s money suppliers, which include several Ukrainian ministries, whose funding comes in turn from the International Monetary Fund, the US, and the European Union (EU).  “KSE Institute’s clients”, the institution’s website says of its paymasters, “also include the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, the European Business Association, and a number of large law and development companies. Among the international partner organizations are USAID, UK aid, DFID, the embassies of the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, the EBRD, the World Bank, the EU Commission, IFC, WHO, UNDP, GIZ, UNICEF, Yale School of Management and others.”  

KSE’s “SelfSanctions” project is paid for by another group of “partners” including George Soros, government-backed organizations in Germany, Norway, Taiwan, and Poland, and a Ukrainian entity called “Squeezing Putin”.    This takes US and other intelligence material, feeds it to the Anglo-American media, and then identifies the media reports as corroboration of the process for sanctioning companies which remain in Russia and are attacked in the press as an “international sponsor of war”.  

KS adds a note of self-importance: “Kyiv School of Economics holds the first place among the most powerful economic analytical institutions of Ukraine according to the RePEc rating.”   

The importance, the breaking news, is that, according to the newly published evidence, 82.7% of the international companies surveyed have dismissed KSE, its foreign state financiers, and its economic warfare projects as a failure – and their shareholders concur.

This is how the Maidan cookie crumbles.

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 7th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Axis of Resistance — that’s the Arab militaries with Iran and in the background, Russia – knows how to wage economic warfare against the US and its proxy, Israel. The Houthi sanctions on shipping, for example, are showing more effectiveness in stopping Israel-bound or Israel-linked vessels in the Red Sea than US sanctions have been to block Russian oil shipments.

In attrition war, on the economic front just like the Gaza and other fire fronts, the Axis of Resistance wins by maintaining its offensive capacities and operations for longer than the US and US-backed Israeli forces can defend. Like troops, tanks, and artillery pieces, the operational goal is to grind the enemy slowly but surely into retreat, then capitulation.

How to measure if this is happening now to the Israelis in the international money markets?

An international currency and bond trader answers by providing, first, a primer for each of the market indicators, and how to read them; and then a ready reckoner for the damage being done to Israel’s economic resources as those who operate in the money markets gauge their opportunity.

For making money, you see, the opportunity of capitalizing on Israel’s defeat may soon be more profitable than investing in its success. When the markets see this chance at profit-making, usually long before the politicians and their captive media acknowledge it, there is an inflection point in the flow of money. That does its damage, not by hitting the Israelis and Americans in their bunkers with bullets and bombs, but by moving the money the US-backed Israeli entity needs out of reach, and cutting them off, both the US and Israel,  from market confidence that they can win their war, genocide or not.

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by Editor - Tuesday, February 6th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In a London courtroom on Friday, Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image), the retired judge whom the British government has appointed to run a public inquiry into the alleged Novichok poisonings of March and June 2018, collapsed into a farce of state secrecy.

Not even the open hearings which are now scheduled to start later this year, on October 14, will in fact be open, Hughes told lawyers for the Home Office and for the family of Dawn Sturgess. This is because the police and the security services have told the judge they want a livestream default or broadcasting delay of at least fifteen minutes, possibly longer when “the police will decide if any disclosure at all will be made”, a government lawyer told the judge.

Hughes announced: “I absolutely accept how difficult it is when you are batting in the dark…but it is a situation which has simply got to be coped with.”

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by Editor - Sunday, February 4th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The lifespan of gorillas in captivity is usually over fifty years, while in the wild the average  beast can expect to reach 40, depending on his diet and his success at evading hunters.  Gorillas are omnivores, but by preference they are vegetarians. They don’t eat bananas; they will eat meat if plant food is scarce. They will eat duck if it sits long enough to be caught.  

Gorilla Radio is omnivorous, and for life expectancy it has a way to go. Sitting ducks are easy prey. But that’s enough metaphor.

Never before on Gorilla Radio has there been such a moment for the radio to broadcast this  news – the United States is losing two wars, and the strategic positions it has methodically built up in Europe since 1945, and in the Middle East since the Jewish state was established in 1948.

The proxies, US-backed Ukraine and US-backed Israel, are falling back as the number of fronts is greater than they have the men or materiel to hold, and their US-supplied arms face battlefield defeat.  

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

When the General Staff have been discussing with President Vladimir Putin the timing of the Russian offensive to force the Kiev regime into capitulation, it has been agreed, understood, and repeated that the strategic reserves of the Ukrainian forces should be destroyed first, together with the supply lines for the weapons and ammunition crossing the border from the US and the NATO allies.

This process, they also agreed, should take as long as required with least casualties on the Russian side, as determined by military intelligence. Also agreed and pre-conditional, there should be no repeat of the political intelligence failures of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) which precipitated the failed special forces operation known as the Battle of Antonov (Hostomel) Airport from February 24 to April 2, 2022.  

Taking account of the mistakes made then by the SVR director, Sergei Naryshkin, and the subsequent mistakes of military officers around Yevgeny Prigozhin, the General Staff has also accepted that their tactical operations must run least risk of Russian casualties through March 17, the final day of the presidential election.

Reinforcing these preconditions for the timing of the Russian offensive,  General Winter  and General Patience   have joined the Stavka meetings.  

This week military sources believe there has been a turning point – on the Ukrainian battlefield, and on the Russian clock.

The daily Defense Ministry briefing and bulletin from Moscow reported last Thursday, before the Friday weekly summary, that the Ukrainian KIA (killed in action) for the previous twenty-four hours totaled 795, with the ratio of offensive tactics to defence,  3 to 3. On Monday, the KIA total was 680, the ratio 4 to 3. On Tuesday, KIA came to 885, the ratio 5 to 1.  The casualty rate is unusually high; the shift to offence is recognizably new, if not announced.  

The “Stavka Project”, a military briefing which is broadcast by Vladimir Soloviev, confirms the positional breakthroughs this week on several of the fronts or “directions”, as the Defense Ministry calls them,  along the Donbass line; click to watch (in Russian).   

In Boris Rozhin’s summary of the Defense Ministry briefing materials, published before dawn on Wednesday morning,   the leading Russian military blogger (Colonel Cassad)  identifies “small advances”, “slight movements”, some positional “successes”, other positional “counter-fighting”,  and “no significant progress yet”. The adverb is military talk for timing.

According to a military source outside Russia, “the Russian breakthrough is beginning to happen now. It’s being coordinated with strikes and raids along the northern border. The commitment of the ‘crack’ Ukrainian brigades at the expense of other sectors shows how desperate [General Valery] Zaluzhny is to plug the holes. He knows that the target is the isolation of Kharkov, the establishment of a demilitarized ‘buffer zone’, as well as the development of a situation whereby all Ukrainian forces east of the Dnieper are threatened with being cut off… and he’s quickly running out of ammunition, not to mention cannon fodder.”

“By the end of the winter,” the source has added overnight, “the Ukrainians will barely be able to move along the roads they use to feed the front due to the Russian drone, missile, conventional air, and artillery strikes. Once they can no longer plug the gaps with mechanized units acting as fire-fighting brigades, it’s just a matter of time before the big breakthroughs and encirclements begin. At the current burn rate of Ukrainian forces, I imagine we’ll start seeing Russian tanks with fuel tanks fitted for extended range appearing and Russian airborne troops making air assaults in the Ukrainian rear within weeks.”

In yesterday’s edition of the Moscow security analysis platform Vzglyad, Yevgeny Krutikov, a leading Russian military analyst with GRU service himself and GRU sources for his reporting since, published a report entitled “What does the offensive of Russian troops in the Kharkov region mean?” “Russia is creating a new strategic situation in the Kharkov region,” Krutikov concluded,    “threatening to dismember the Ukrainian defence up to the Donetsk agglomeration.” A verbatim English translation of this piece follows.

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

The Hamas offensive of October 7 caught the Israel Defence Forces asleep at their posts. This  weekend’s drone strike against Tower-22, a US troop base in northeastern Jordan, caught the US Army troops asleep.

The response, according to President Joseph Biden’s statement, is that “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing….we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”   General Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, repeated: “Iran-backed militias are responsible for these continued attacks on U.S. forces, and we will respond at a time and place of our choosing.”  

Donald Trump, campaigning to defeat Biden in the November election, declared in an election  statement, reported in full  by a Russian military blogger, “this brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender. Three years ago, Iran was weak, broke, and totally under control. Thanks to my Maximum Pressure policy…This attack would NEVER have happened if I was President, not even a chance. Just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would right now have peace throughout the World. Instead, we are on the brink of World War 3.”  

This is how the psychopathic liar now fights the demented on behalf of the genocidalists to trigger all-fronts war in the Middle East.

The details of the Tower-22 attack, and Iran’s reinforcement at the Strait of Hormuz, reveal that the Arabs and the Iranians are ready and waiting. The Russians too.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 28th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

For the time being, there are no official photographs of the meeting in Moscow on Thursday evening at the Russian Foreign Ministry between Mikhail Bogdanov, the deputy foreign minister and chief Russian negotiator in the Middle East and Africa, and  Mohammed (Mukhameddov) Abdelsalam leading a  delegation of the Ansarallah government of Yemen, known as the Houthi movement.  

The absence of photographs does not mean a blackout. 

Bogdanov’s communiqué said “special attention was paid to the development of tragic events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict zone, as well as the aggravation of the situation in the Red Sea in this regard. In this context, the missile and bomb attacks on Yemen undertaken by the United States and Great Britain, which are capable of destabilizing the situation on a regional scale, were strongly condemned.”

This is the plainest signal to date of Russian backing for the southern front of the Arab war against Israel, and the link which the Houthis have made between the Israeli blockade of Gaza,  the genocide of the Palestinians, and the Red Sea blockade which the Houthis have imposed on vessels owned or directed by Israeli shipowners,  US naval fleet, and American-flagged and other vessels carrying military and civil cargoes to Israel or reload ammunition for future attacks on Yemen.

At the same time across Moscow, unusually large delegations of officials of the Russian Security Council, led by Nikolai Patrushev, and Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, special presidential representative and Secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, have been meeting to discuss a detailed agenda which Patrushev’s communiqué calls a “wide range of Russian-Iranian security cooperation” and “the practical implementation of the agreements reached at the highest level.” 

In an open statement for reporters, Ahmadian told Patrushev: “”America’s grandeur has shattered, and today, it cannot even rally its traditional allies. A country that considers itself a superpower is engaged in war against resistance groups and the people of the region.”  

The display of Russian support for the Axis of Resistance  against Israel and the US is unprecedented. The Foreign Ministry and Security Council meetings confirm there is now a new definition of “terrorism” in Russian warfighting strategy, in which there is both public and secret support for Hamas, the Houthis, and other groups in Lebanon and Iraq fighting for national liberation against Israel and the US.

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by Editor - Thursday, January 25th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When a man is drowning, he reportedly sees excerpts from his life story flashing in review in the two minutes it takes for his lungs to fill up with water, stopping the heart and cutting off the oxygen supply to his brain.

When an Italian writer recently attempted over two hundred and eighty-five pages to imagine what President Vladimir Putin is really like, he drowned before he got to the truth.  But not before he managed a great deal of hand-waving and hyper-ventilation which is also typical of drowning victims.

Hand-waving and hyper-ventilation about the leadership of Russia in the present war can make a best-seller in the states which are losing the war. The Financial Times which is owned by Japan and written in England recommends the book for portraying “Putin as a lone wolf who works as others sleep.”   He’s also a cross between a wolf and a pitbull — “a power animal. You end up killing everyone because, in a way, that guarantees your survival. That’s why the last [depiction] of Putin in the book is him alone in a graveyard — with his dog, of course. The dog is always important.”  

Indeed — dogs take five times longer than men to drown. So they see more flashbacks before they succumb.   

The Italian’s name is Giuliano da Empoli – that’s Julian of Empoli, a medieval town turned nondescript industrial zone, which is too far from the sea — sixty kilometres — to drown in. It is only a brisk walk, however, to submerge in the Arno River which marks the northern boundary of the old town.

Da Empoli claims, as do the promotions of the book in the anti-Russia propaganda organs, that he is writing about Putin and how power is exercised in Russian politics. Da Empoli’s method is to have the author’s narrator, a shrinking violet type, interview his opposite, a brash character modelled after Vladislav Surkov (lead image), onetime Kremlin plotter and plodder with the Ukraine portfolio, and self-styled ideologist in chief. In the outcome, the book’s Surkov character reveals next to nothing about the real Surkov’s performance – that’s a discovery which da Empoli, lacking the sources, hasn’t made himself.

More to the point, the book’s title Wizard of the Kremlin    reveals that the alchemy attributed to  Putin is what the alchemical combinations of melanosis (blackening), leucosis (whitening), xanthosis (yellowing) and iosis (reddening) have always proved to be – an illusion of words, a fantasy of colours, a PR trick people are persuaded to pay to believe. At seventeen dollars for da Empoli’s paperback, that’s a more costly illusion than the cheap enlightenment of reading this to the end.

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There is no lack of confidence in Donetsk that the war will be won, but no conviction when exactly that will be.

A Ukrainian heavy artillery salvo hit the Kirovsky district market, on the western outskirts of  Donetsk city on Sunday,  killing at least 27 people, and wounding about as many. The New York Times reported falsely “it was not possible to independently confirm which side launched the strike.”  

The reaction in Donetsk, and also in Moscow, is that the incident triggers serious questioning of how the Russian military operations can be failing still to drive long-range Ukrainian artillery, rockets and missiles far enough westwards to protect the civilians of Donetsk region; and also  the three other accession regions of expanded Donbass; as well as the Russian border regions to the north of Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk.

The daily operations briefing and bulletin from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow are reporting exceptionally high casualty rates for the Ukrainian side – 860 last Thursday; 1,005 on Monday; 700 on Tuesday. The bulletin,  which is blocked on the internet in many of the NATO allied states, also reveals a rising toll on the US and NATO-supplied long-range guns, and a changing ratio for Russian army operations each day from defence to offence.

Still, sources in Donetsk and Moscow acknowledge that although the pace and impact of Russian  operations along the line of contact have been growing in recent days, the east-to-west depth of the demilitarized zone required for long-term security remains a hope and military ambition —  not yet the reality on the ground, or in the economy of Donetsk.

Donetsk business sources say they are actively planning for the reconstruction of the region’s mining and metals fabrication industries, and they are negotiating terms of financial assistance for both with the federal authorities, as well as the regional administration. The sources said this week they are sure that in the plans now being discussed there will be no return of the Ukrainian oligarchs who controlled Donetsk’s economy in the past, especially Rinat Akhmetov,  Igor Kolomoisky,   and Victor Pinchuk.  

The Donetsk sources said the most pressing problem at the moment is the lack of manpower to return from the fighting to work; the sources are considering importing North Koreans to fill the manpower gap.

For the longer term, the conviction in Donetsk is that there will also be no return of the criminal gangs who had dominated the local economy in parallel with, and accommodated by the oligarchs. “From the Russian side,” said a business figure in the steel industry, “I am sure the recovery and reconstruction will be done with a heavy hand. No mafia.”

In a lengthy interview just published in Moscow,    the Donetsk regional government’s plan for reviving the local economy has been presented in detail.  Vladislav Vasilivev, the deputy regional chief for the economy, does the talking. Donetsk business sources, who have read the interview, confirm the details.

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

By Russian oligarch standards, Vladimir Lisin (lead image) – iron-ore and coalminer, steelmaker, land and sea transporter, shipbuilder — is the only honest one.

In the acquisition, enlargement,  and protection of his asset holdings over thirty years, he has also managed to defeat the dishonest ones, starting with Oleg Deripaska,  then Mikhail Prokhorov,  then Victor Rashnikov,   not to mention offshore raiders like George Soros and David Reuben of the Trans World Group.  

Those who have known Lisin longest, including me, don’t put this down to his factory-floor  origins, to his two PhDs and fluent English – Lisin is the best educated of the oligarchs —  nor to his alliances with Soviet and Yeltsin-era politicians. “Straight and honest was his character”, says an American metals trader today, who worked with him in the 1990s. “The disputes [with Lisin] were not easy,” says Oleg Korolev, between 1998 and 2018 the governor of Lipetsk region, where Lisin’s main steel production is based, “but they always ended objectively and fairly.”

“[He is] one of the most original stars in the oligarchic firmament,” concludes the latest business media profile published in Moscow a few days ago.   “He has never aspired to power, like, for example, [Vladimir] Potanin, but has such an administrative resource that even [Anatoly] Chubais in exile, according to rumours, has been asking [Lisin] to intercede for him with the Kremlin’s decision makers. He hasn’t poked his nose into erstwhile political projects, like [Roman] Abramovich…He has not received any special state awards, unlike his colleague, Hero of Labor of Russia Rashnikov, but no one will deny his powerful personal contribution to the development of NLMK and to the country’s economy. He did not participate in the loans-for-shares schemes or in the semibankirschina.  Nevertheless, he has created one of the most advanced, diversified, and effective business empires which his colleagues on the Forbes list can envy.”

And yet, since the start of the Special Military Operation two years ago, Lisin has been stripping the assets of the group in which his shareholding control is about 80%.  He has been selling both steelmaking and transportation businesses to independent buyers, not nominees; from them in return he has received between $3.5 billion and $4 billion in cash from the deals.  

At the same time, he has preserved the original Novolipetsk Steel Metallurgical Combine (NLMK), the core of his group, plus the coal and iron-ore mines and energy sources which supply NLMK, and enable it to produce cheaper steel than its domestic or foreign competitors.

This is what turf bookmakers call an each-way bet – on steelmaking in the domestic Russian market to support and profit from the Russian victory over the US and NATO in the Ukraine; and on cash banked through the UAE, outside the reach of US and European economic warfighters and sanctioneers, and also the Russian tax man.  

Still at risk in this wager are Lisin’s castle and grouse shoot in Perthshire, Scotland; a home in Geneva; a motor yacht he calls Socrates, and a Bombardier airplane. Hedging that risk are his steel plants in Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy,  and the US which continue to be so vital for the political survival of the regimes in those states, not to mention their defence industries, that they have secured quota-busting concessions until 2024 or longer, in order to keep importing Lisin’s Russian steel products for their production lines.    

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by Editor - Sunday, January 21st, 2024
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