By Yevgeny Krutikov, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The problem of interpreting the war from the Russian point of view is that the Russian military does not signal its punches, make idle threats, believe its own propaganda, or make money on click bait. The Stavka never leaks.  

By contrast, Russian open-source commentators are driven, as is normal in a functioning democracy, by domestic politics. This requires them to disguise or camouflage their support for or opposition to the political and oligarch factions in Moscow with a variety of ploys — attacks on named generals; analyses of the Army’s mistakes; speculation about the negotiations initiated by US officials with their Russian counterparts; warnings of Fifth Columns, stabs in the back, and a shameful peace.  

The outcome in Moscow doesn’t exist in any European or North American capital — noisy debate with sharp dividing lines drawn between the factions of patriots (Tsargrad, Vladimir Soloviev); the left (Sergei Glazyev, Mikhail Khazin); the fakes (Yevgeny Prigozhin); the right (Elvira Nabiullina, Alexei Khudrin); the oligarchs (Oleg Deripaska); the puppets (Margarita Simonyan); and so on, not counting the oppositionists in hiding, exile or jail.

Easy to misread Russian military analysis then, because there is so much of it; because the Stavka doesn’t talk to any of them; and because for Russian commentators this is an opportunity for waging their contests for the usual things — power, money, celebrity. You will see criticism of President Vladimir Putin (lead image, 2^nd left, rear), therefore, but always under cover of something or somebody else. 

This is understandable because he and the war aims are so popular. Public support for Putin is currently ten points higher than it was in January of this year; three points lower than in April; two points higher than in September.  There is nothing and no one comparable on the US or NATO side.  Since the start of the special military operation on February 24, the Russian president’s approval rating has remained stable within a 4-point variance; that is roughly equal to the pollster’s margin for statistical error.  This means that, strategically speaking, most Russians are almost as patient as the Stavka.

By contrast, the politics of the US and NATO side is an impatient, short-term business. A week is a long time in politics, the former British prime minister Harold Wilson  once said, correcting Joseph Chamberlain, a nineteenth century predecessor who didn’t quite make it to the prime ministry; Chamberlain said it was two weeks.

Warfare is a longer term business. This war is going to be longer still.

To follow, understand, and anticipate as Russians do requires a form of thinking that can be called byzantine. Not the western meaning of deviousness, but the eastern meaning of the way the thousand-year Byzantine empire was ruled from Constantinople. In our time this starts with the doctrine of economy of force.  Cost-effective calculations regulate the deployment of men and materiel, hence the changeable combination and schedule of fixed-wing air attack, helicopter air attack, missiles, drones, and artillery in Russian operations so far. The rules of war of attrition also apply, as do the tactical variables of positional and mobile warfare. By the time these variables are counted up, and multiplied by firepower and deception, this is thinking which goes  far beyond games of chess or Go. Situation report maps in publication don’t help much; they are already days old and obsolete.

Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov’s  (lead image,  left front) strategy of the Golden Bridge,  applied successfully against Napoleon, requires allowing the enemy the time and space to retreat and withdraw to his own territory because the cost of annihilating him on Russian territory is much greater and unnecessary. General Winter (centre front) also requires operational patience because the freeze doesn’t always deploy itself when the Russian army wants it. This year, however, it has begun already. Snow has started falling in Kiev; in a week’s time it will be minus 8 degrees Celsius. It remains warmer along the eastern front, and in Kherson.    

Russian or byzantine thinking is the antithesis of the shock and awe doctrines of the US and NATO.  Their journalists and staff colleges have invented terms to conceal their incomprehension of Generals Sergei Surovikin (front right) and Valery Gerasimov (rear right), and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (rear left). But they remain in the dark – as US Army Colonel (retired) Douglas Macgregor keeps trying to point out.  

Byzantine thinking can’t be memorised, photocopied, or cribbed. To learn, start with this paradox of imperial impatience first published by C.P. Cavafy in 1904; he called it “Waiting for the barbarians”.  

There is also what Russians say they are thinking will come next. Take it as carefully as you read Cavafy.  What’s the hurry?

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 15th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The British Government has admitted over the weekend that its troops currently running the British war in the Ukraine are also engaged in managing the document file for the alleged Novichok attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March 2018.

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by Editor - Sunday, November 13th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The British Government revealed this week it is paying Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image), a retired judge, £900.83 per month to conduct a public inquiry into the Government’s Novichok allegations against Russia.

Following two preliminary hearings in March  and July,  Hughes has ruled that none of the state evidence for the allegations will be tested in public without passing through a closed-door declassification process lasting until next year,  and may be kept secret even then. Direct  witnesses, including Sergei and Yulia Skripal, are to be subject to “special security arrangements” and may not be permitted to testify freely in open hearing. And in Hughes’s latest order, the “livestream” broadcast of the hearing scheduled for November 11, has been delayed for five minutes before the press can hear it.

This new measure was introduced to allow government censors to stop the embarrassing disclosures which slipped out at the last hearing on July 15. The first of these came from the lawyer representing the family of Dawn Sturgess, whose death in July 2018 was allegedly caused by Novichok poisoning: the lawyer, Michael Mansfield KC,  said the government’s evidence against the Russians may be “an empty barrel”. He was followed by the lawyer speaking for the Home Office, the British police and security ministry, who claimed her evidence of the Russian threat came from “the Danish investigation of the MH17 attack.”  

At the opening of today’s hearing, Hughes said the broadcast delay has been introduced to “guard against the accidental mention of sensitive material”. “Should an accident happen”, he  added,  “the risk can’t be taken.” A Home Office lawyer followed Hughes, declaring in court that the broadcast delay and the years of delay in reviewing evidence documents are justified to protect the national security. “There has been no delay in the sense of needlessly wasted time,” Cathryn McGahey KC claimed.

Hughes was also asked to confirm that his government contract for running the public inquiry includes a monthly payment of 83 pence. According to his spokesman, “the Chair is remunerated on a standard scale that applies to all retired judges.”

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by Editor - Friday, November 11th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The news from Odessa, the third city of the Ukraine and its leading port, is there is almost no news.

This has strategic significance. It means there is no Russian plan for a battle for Odessa, no artillery, missile, air, or naval attack on the city. The Odessans know this, and  they appreciate it privately.

Instead, sources say different things to different callers. “There is a fear of being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or overheard,” says one source. “Everyone I talk to is very guarded recently on phone calls. Everyone says some template words. It’s difficult to have a good frank and free conversation. They will say all the Zelensky-friendly or Putin-hostile things to a US or British reporter. When they speak in Russian though, there is ambiguity, caution, double meaning.”

The only talkative source from inside the city is DTEK, the national electric utility owned by Rinat Akhmetov, which is issuing daily bulletins and customer notices advising power outages and blackout schedules. https://dtek.com/en/ 

The Odessa Journal, the English language publication of the city, has not been publishing local news, deciding instead to republish national media bulletins originating in Kiev. A search of Strana.ua, vilified in Kiev as pro-Russian,  reveals almost no Odessa-source coverage.   

A city source, a well-informed journalist, says off the record there is “no need” because there is an understanding among the city residents there will be no Russian attack on the city itself, and the city residents and administration are confident this is the Kremlin’s intention. “Right now we think Odessa is protected because of the grain corridor”, and the terms of agreement between Russia, Turkey, the United Nations, and Kiev.

Politically, the source adds, the city is split down the middle:  the evidence is clear in the public reaction to attempts by anti-Russian groups to attack the statue of Catherine II (lead images) in the old city centre and force its demolition or removal.

The digital vote in favour, announced in the Kiev and western media, was fabricated, the source says. “Registration to vote was very strange. It was impossible for many people to vote. In reality, 50% of the population are in favour of removal; 50% are in favour of the statue remaining. There has been a big intrigue, and there are some very aggressive members of the city council using the situation for their own PR. Right now, the statue is covered so as not to be damaged [lead image, right]. In the current situation people just want to do something.”

The city council  headed by Gennady Trukhanov — narrowly elected mayor in 2020 —   is scheduled to meet and vote its decision on November 30.  But there is a compromise formula in negotiation, the source reveals, between the pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, in order to bridge the deep division in the city at large.

In the meantime, protection of civility between the factions, like the black cover over the Catherine statue, has been agreed. No news from Odessa means this is the news.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 9th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

William Browder has been a spokesman for making war on Russia for seventeen years, ever since he was evicted from the country for running investment frauds. The history of those frauds had run for an earlier decade.

Lucy Komisar is the US journalist and financial fraud analyst who has written the history of these frauds. Browder, she says, “is the world’s most brilliant conman, and he comes to it at a time when the con he is pushing is desired by people in power. “

“I first ran into him two decades ago,” Komisar explains. “In 2000 I got a U.S. National Research Council grant to study money laundering in Russia. I found it! The crook I discovered was William Browder, an American investor who had just changed his passport to the UK to avoid taxes on his profits.”

On the eve of Browder’s keynote speech to a convention of chartered financial analysts in Toronto, Matt Ehret interviews Komisar for a discussion of the Browder case.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 9th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week the first snow landed on Moscow without sticking. On Thursday a significant  anniversary has also fallen without sticking.

It has been ninety-one years since November 3, 1931, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party voted the resolution to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionised and democratised for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.

The creation of Gorky Park had been an idea of Joseph Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999). Since Tsar Peter I and Empress Catherine II (lead image, left), Stalin (right) is the most notable gardening ruler in Russian history – and the only one to have put a personal hand to the soil and boot to the shovel.  

Since the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar’s time learned to adapt their lack of water to their need for greenery, the great gardening cultures are those which manage to find unique solutions to the particularities and the constants of weather, soil, and taste. Those who only imitate discover that no amount of money they throw at their gardens will enable the plants to overcome the elements, or the lack of them.

The Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Italians, French and English have all managed; they have created monuments of horticultural invention which can be enjoyed forever.  The great Russian gardens, however, are a different story. There has been almost no one to tell it – and there is one still one thing missing from the tale, the winter snow.  

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by Editor - Sunday, November 6th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that the Ukraine has become a thieves’ paradise  in which  corporate loan defaults are written off;  embezzlement from banks is not traced;   the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) no longer audits the country’s bank liabilities and reserves;  and the IMF admits it cannot tell how much of the $35 billion in foreign cash grants and loans promised to Kiev has been disbursed, or to whom.

“Disbursements of all committed funds over the remaining months of the year is urgently needed and will make a difference,” declares Kristalina Georgieva (lead image), the IMF Managing director since 2019, “especially in light of the recent horrific damage to energy infrastructure.”  Georgieva was speaking in Berlin on October 25.  

“In a best-case scenario,” she added, “we estimate that Ukraine’s financing needs would be about $3 billion per month. When we incorporate some additional financing for higher gas imports and some repair of critical infrastructure, we quickly reach $4 billion per month. The recent missile attacks, which have clearly caused much more damage, not only confirms the validity of these estimates but leads us to consider $5 billion upper range.”

However, in a 32-page IMF staff report    on the state of Ukrainian budget finance and the risk of system-wide financial collapse, the Fund experts  have concluded that “large-scale forbearance with a delayed recognition of NPLs [commercial bank non-performing loans] and the suspension of NBU enforcement actions and audits of financial statements make a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the war difficult and uncertain.” The report has been released at this link on the IMF website.

“Uncertainty” is IMF officialspeak for black hole. “The balance of probabilities,” according to the staff paper dated October 3,  “would suggest that Ukraine has an unsustainable level of debt.” According to the Fund rules, this should suspend or stop IMF and all other foreign government cashflows.

Georgieva and the IMF board, dominated by the US, say otherwise. The  black hole,  the staff report goes on to say,  is  “unique to the extreme circumstances now prevailing in Ukraine, [so] very high uncertainty makes it difficult, at present, to estimate with sufficient precision the impact of the war on the debt outlook, and what would be required to restore sustainability.”

Instead, they have accepted a promise issued in a letter to the Fund dated October 1 from the Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergei Marchenko and NBU Governor Kirill Shevchenko. “We commit to undergoing a new safeguards assessment of the National Bank of Ukraine and will continue providing IMF staff with the NBU’s audit reports and authorize its external auditors to hold discussions with staff.”

This is a future promise. The NBU audit reports already received by the Fund in Washington ought to show exactly how much foreign cash has been received at the NBU, and what has happened to it in the disbursement throughout the Ukrainian public finance system. They don’t.  In fact, the staff report tables show “disbursed and prospective official financing” conflating the two numbers together, and  treating both as imprecise and unreliable because they are “2022 proj[ected].”

On October 7 the Fund’s Executive Board met to agree to the despatch of a fresh $1.29 billion in cash, and to accept the NBU’s promissory note for future accountability. The staff report says the new money is to be paid through the “food shock window of the Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI)”. The black hole promise has been assigned an IMF acronym; it’s to be called the PMB – “Project Monitoring with Board involvement.”

Once PMB is put into operation, Marchenko and Shevchenko told the Board in their letter, “we expect [it to] help eventually pave the way for an Upper Credit Tranche arrangement in the near future”. This is Ukrainian officialspeak for turning “eventually” into the “near future”; and for throwing more good money after bad.

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by Editor - Thursday, November 3rd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Until capitulation in war, the winning side is the one that learns fastest. The loser is the slowpoke.

In Washington, the turnover of staff inside President Biden’s White House has been so rapid, the learning process for the new staff has been almost as retarded as the incapacity to learn has been accelerating on the part of Biden himself.*

On October 25, the Washington Post revealed how protracted this state of incomprehension is on the US side. “Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have been so methodical and destructive that administration officials say they are being led by power experts who know exactly which targets will cause the most damage to Ukraine’s power grid.”

Five days earlier, on October 20, the Russian Ministry of Defense had made this official for the first time in its daily war bulletins. “During the day [October 19-20], the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continued to strike with high-precision long-range air-based weapons at the military control and energy systems of Ukraine. All assigned objects have been hit.”

Six days before that, the Kiev regime made it official. In a press interview on October 14, the chief executive of the DTEK power utility, Maxim Timchenko, said: “These strikes are not aimed at generating facilities to prevent us from producing electricity but at connection systems tied to the Ukrainian energy system. They hit open switchgears, transformers, switches, so that a station that can produce electricity cannot be connected to the unified power system. That is, the key targets are Ukrenergo transformer high-voltage substations and power distribution equipment at thermal power plants. What [are] the tactics behind this? Since Soviet times, we have built unified energy systems so that if one of the generation flows fails at some part of the system, another one picks it up. That is, everything is looped and we work in a single system. In Soviet times, a power system scheme was built, where everything is set up for similar events that are happening today.”

“I think the Russian military [consults] their power engineers and they explain how to cause maximum harm to the energy system.”

The Ukrainians aren’t either so uncomprehending or so slow to react. Although they continue to tell pollsters from Kiev they want the war to continue – 89% in Kiev and Galicia, 69% east of the Dnieper River – their feet are doing the talking differently. Polish Border Guard figures – reported daily — show that in the days before the Russian raids on the electric grid began in earnest on October 10, more Ukrainians left Poland to return home across the frontier than the movement from the Ukraine into Poland.

After October 10, however, the cross-border flow has changed direction. Significantly more Ukrainians are now moving to Poland. Vienna press reports are suggesting in parallel that more refugees are crossing into Austria from Poland.

For the time being, the Russian plan of attack is not hitting the electric grid powering the passenger trains between Kiev, Lvov, and the Polish terminal at Przemysl. Instead, they have been cutting power to trains moving east from Kiev towards the Dnieper River and the front from Kharkov to Odessa.

North American experts on infrastructure warfare believe the Russian strategy is to intensify the pressure on Washington, Warsaw, and Berlin to decide if they are willing to take over the direct war-fighting as the Ukrainian resources are being exhausted – replacing air defences, artillery, electricity supplies and equipment, fuel, troops, and advisors. “There’s a logistical limit for NATO to fight to the last Ukrainian”, one of the expert sources observes. “It’s not to the last Ukrainian who can be put on to the battlefield. It’s to the last volt to get him there, supplied with food, fuel and ordnance.”

In this stage the choice is between direct war and proxy war.

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 1st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“Not  One Inch” is the title of a new book by American historian Mary Sarotte after the notorious promise which US Secretary of State James Baker (lead image, 2nd from right) gave Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, and which now has come to its final test on the battlefields of World War III against Russia.

The work was recently awarded the Pushkin House prize for best book of the year, which is not less promising than Baker was. This is because Pushkin House is a London propaganda agency on the side against Russia.  The publisher of the book is Yale University which has been printing a stream of Russia warfighting tracts for years.  

Sarotte acknowledges the principal sources for her version of the story are Baker himself – “[he] generously allowed me to access the collection of his papers that he had donated to Princeton University, including documents from crucial meetings in Moscow in 1990” – together with the Bush and Clinton presidential libraries. Out of what Sarotte counts as “more than a hundred participants in events”, the only Russian source she reports consulting in Moscow was the Gorbachev Fund archive and four Russians she says she spoke to:  they are Yeltsin-government officials in retirement like ex-foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev living in the  US where he “has asked [to] keep his exact location off the record.”  

The money to pay Sarotte  she says she received from the Henry Kravis fund created from his tax-deductible KKR investment dividends;  the German Foreign Ministry through the German Marshall Fund;  the US State Department; the US Agency for International Development; and the US Embassy in Moscow.

Following this money trail to Sarotte’s conclusion one inch from the end of her book, she reports having discovered that for the future of Europe, “European security remains centered on Washington. US withdrawal would create a massive security vacuum in Europe… The Atlantic Alliance, as an expression of deep American engagement in Europe, remains the best institution to take on this mission.” To respond to what she calls President Vladimir Putin’s “violent aggression” against Georgia and the Ukraine, she recommends “putting out the fire and keeping the structure stable.”

With NATO war-fighting talk like this, why read on?

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 1st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

How can the English retain their sense of humour, let alone make war on Russia, when their country – I mean England, not Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster – is the laughingstock of the world?

The answer is not to receive the message. That’s Roger for Receive — military radio jargon since the last world war.  Also, Roger, the older English term for men having rough sexual intercourse, which was brought to England by the last foreign invaders to succeed, the Normans wielding what in their language originally meant a sharp spear.

There is a lot of rogering in the second sense in John Mortimer’s autobiography of himself as an old gentleman with failing, if not exhausted powers. Mortimer was an English barrister, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and inventor of Rumpole of the Bailey, the only lawyer in world history to be loved by millions of people.  Mortimer’s rule for comic writing was Conspicuous Consummation – that’s the display of such sexual prowess that can combine hand relief in fact with comic relief in fiction.

Mortimer died in 2009, so he can’t test his rule himself on the recent history of England at war with Russia  which began with the Novichok fiction of March 2018 and the appointment this week of a new foreign minister called Cleverly in fact. We can.

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
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