By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The first Moscow newspaper analysis has appeared of Russia’s current position towards Israel and Palestine. It supports President Vladimir Putin’s public endorsement of the two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians.  

Entitled “Why Russia remains neutral in the conflict in the Middle East”, Vzglyad, the Moscow security strategy publication, posted the piece late on Friday evening, October 13.   It added an opinion poll for its readers with a single question, “should Russia recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation?”

The new analysis and conclusion are in contrast to Vzglyad’s call six months ago for Russia to reorient its position towards the Arab side.  This is also a marked change of editorial line in the prevailing silence in Moscow: there has been no Security Council meeting since October 3;  no State Duma debate; no national opinion polling of public attitudes.   

The Arab-Israeli conflict is the one in which Israel is destroying the remnants of the Palestine state territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and replaces that two-state solution with a single state; that is the Israeli one in which about 7 million Jews restrict about 2 million Arabs in bantustans administered according to an apartheid regime.   

The rules of this Jewish-based order have been fixed in Israel’s constitutional amendment enacted in 2018 as the “Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People”,    and ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021.   This adopts the single- state solution expanding territorially by resettlement of the Palestinian territories “as a national value”; and in parallel, combating international opposition to the process by Israeli state operations to “preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish People among Jews in the Diaspora.”  

By equating Jewish ethnicity and religious faith with nationality of the Israeli state, this constitution eliminates Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim rights with the formula, “the exercise of the right to national self-determination  in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” The corollary is that any Palestinian exercise of the right to self-determination on the expanding Jewish national territory is illegal, anti-Semitic, and terrorist. Internationally, it is the policy of Israel and its allies to make support for or discussion of Palestinian right to self-determination a thought and speech crime.

In Russian politics, this is the one international conflict on which President Vladimir Putin has said so much since the start of his term, and done so little – this has been to advocate the two-state solution in public while in private to impose a do-nothing,  say-catchword line on diplomats and military officials, and the state media.   

The gap between the Kremlin and the General Staff and Defense Ministry became visible in September 2018 after the Israel Air Force caused the shoot-down in Syria of a Russian Ilyushin-20M electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and the killing of all fifteen crewmen on board.  At that time the Russian military expressed a loss of confidence which had not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military support of Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, and dismissed Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.   

In the present fighting between Palestinian, Arab and Israeli forces, the options for Russian action are numerous;  the public debate over what the options should be has been nugatory. There have been no national opinion polls;  no State Duma debate; no meeting of the Security Council since October 3.  

An initial statement by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church was carefully balanced between Palestine and Israel, referring to the “military conflict” between the two sides, not a unilateral act of terrorism. “Peaceful coexistence” between the religious communities, Kirill said, has a “religious dimension” and requires a “just peace”.   In context, this was a tilt against Israel. The Church’s Department for External Church Relations issued the statement on October 7; there has been nothing since.

As a bellwether of Russian security analysts, Vzglyad’s decision to publish a report of expert assessments on “the advantages of Russia’s neutrality in the conflict in the Middle East” is unusual. Vzglyad’s publishing record shows what the new report is not. Strategically, Russia is being obliged by the US and NATO alliance to fight an all-forces war in Europe, and commit small forces in separate conflicts in Syria; Transdnistria and Moldova; Azerbaijan and Armenia; with the possibility of engagement in the Kosovo fight against Serbia.  There is no discussion in the Vzglyad outline of Russian capacities to conduct military operations on all battlefields simultaneously.

No military or intelligence source, to which Vzglyad has frequent and unique access, has been quoted. Privately, some of these sources suspect bargaining with the US in the Quartet format of the American “monopoly” of Israel for Russia’s “monopoly” of the Ukraine.  

Vzglyad’s writers and editors decline to answer questions.

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by Editor - Saturday, October 14th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The leading Russian opinion pollsters said today they are “not planning” to survey nationwide opinion towards the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the current fighting “in the near future”.

The blackout on public opinion comes as President Vladimir Putin gave his first direct interview on the conflict to the Arab press.  “The issue is complex, very sensitive,” Putin told the Jordan-based al-Ghad television channel. “But at the moment, of course, it is necessary to refrain from harsh statements and, no matter what, it is not necessary to offend the feelings of people who are involved in this conflict”, the Kremlin website recorded.  

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by Editor - Thursday, October 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a time as testing for national liberation movements, and the ethics of armed struggle against race war, it is rare for the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature to publish a book as pretentious, wrong-headed, and silly as J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole.  But that’s exactly what the South African — one of just two from that country to have won the literature prize — has gone and done.

According to the Financial Times, it was the best book of the week which ended last Saturday, October 7. 

That was the day when the Palestinians achieved what the Arabs have been unable to do since the US and United Kingdom created the state of Israel on their way to annihilating every trace of secular nationalist leadership in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.

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by Editor - Thursday, October 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Until now Russia has never been so silent in the middle of a Middle Eastern war.

Russian opinion pollsters are reluctant to reveal how far the country’s public opinion is moving away from Israel towards the Palestinians and the anti-American Arab and Iranian side.

The silence from the Kremlin reveals how thoroughly the Israelis have burned their bridges to President Vladimir Putin, and how far, if silently, the Russian President has moved to the side of the General Staff in their assessment of Israel as hostile – on the enemy front with the Ukraine, the US and NATO. Putin’s pro-semitism, on display in his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for several years,   is now impossible in public, also in private.  

The Russian money which has  moved easily between Moscow and Tel Aviv and exercised its influence on Putin’s dealings with the Israelis,  is now fleeing back to Moscow with the oligarch, Mikhail Fridman.  About Fridman’s flight to safe haven in Russia, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has said: “Fridman is a citizen of the Russian Federation. He can come back, live here, leave here, just like any other citizen of the Russian Federation. There is nothing unusual.”  

About that, the Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said something more unusual. “Anyone who left the country and engaged in reprehensible acts, celebrating gunfire on Russian territory and wishing victory to the Nazi Kiev regime, should realize they are not only unwelcome here, but if they do return, Magadan [the gulag] is waiting for them.”  

From a policy of equivalence and equivocation between Israel and the Arabs,  Russia has reached the policy of engagement on the Arab side. The driver has been the US war to defeat and destroy Russia through the Ukraine. The longer the new Palestinian war lasts, the more clearly Russian military and political strategy in the Middle East will pursue a new anti-American line. The consequences are as great as the defeat of the US and NATO which Russia is now inflicting in Europe, and of the western sanctions war in the global commodity markets and the trading lanes at sea.  

“We are witnessing a sharp deterioration of the situation in the Middle East,” Putin said in his public welcome for Iraq’s prime minister, Muhammed Shia al-Sudani, at the Kremlin on Tuesday morning. “I think that many will agree with me that this is a clear example of the United States’ failed policy in the Middle East, which tried to monopolise the settlement process, but, unfortunately, was not concerned with finding compromises acceptable to both sides, but, on the contrary, put forward its own ideas about how this should be done and put pressure on both sides, truly both — first on one, then on the other. But each time without considering the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people, bearing in mind, first of all, the need to implement the decision of the UN Security Council on the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state.”

The Foreign Ministry followed Putin later in the afternoon, when the regular weekly briefing by Maria Zakharova was advanced several days early in order to report there have been direct negotiations with the leaders of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the Arab League, Iran, and Turkey – not with Israel.”*

“The US bet on the ‘freezing’ of the status quo and the promotion of ‘economic peace’, as well as the use of collective formats tailored for crisis response, has not justified itself,” Zakharova said. “Everyone sees the result…The statements of American politicians and public figures calling for ethnic cleansing in the region look monstrous. They openly call for one group of people [to be] near-doomed to complete destruction. Once again, aggression, violation of the rule of law, and the caveman’s hatred have emerged on the surface of the American declarations of good looks and human rights dogmas.”

In the first direct Russian warning to the  US Navy force in the Eastern Mediterranean,  Zakharova added: “So far we see that the situation is developing along the path of escalation. There is a great risk of involving third forces in this conflict. And this is fraught with long-term consequences for the region and for the world.”

Putin followed in the evening on the telephone with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The need for an immediate ceasefire by both sides and the resumption of the negotiation process was emphasised,” according to the Kremlin’s communiqué. “Mutual readiness to actively contribute to this was expressed…Separate issues of Russian-Turkish cooperation in various fields were also touched upon.”  

Erdogan’s press release was more revealing. He and Putin had “touched upon what initiatives can be taken to meet humanitarian needs in the region, as the Turkish president told Putin that targeting civilian settlements is worrying and Türkiye does not welcome such move.”   Erdogan’s twitter announcement adds: “President Erdoğan and President Putin of Russia also exchanged views on potential initiatives to meet humanitarian needs in the region.”  

This is a hint that Erdogan and Putin are contemplating a Turkish ship convoy of aid to Gaza, protected from Israeli attack by the Russian Navy from its Tartous base on the Syrian coast, and by the Russian Air Force from Hmeimim. This humanitarian operation by sea would aim at breaking the blockade of the coast by the Israelis, and running the gauntlet of the USS Gerald Ford and its squadron further offshore.  If this operation, a reminder of the Gaza Flotilla of 2010,   is in planning now – the open signals are warning Washington and the US Navy to expect it – then the confrontation, and the risk to the US and Israel of strategic defeat at sea, are unprecedented.

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 10th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A US Sixth Fleet squadron (lead image, top left) is now steaming towards the eastern shore of the Mediterraean, following the unusual mission last Thursday by a US Navy P-8 aircraft monitoring the state of operational alert of the Russian naval fleet at Tartous, Syria (top right).*

Between August 18 and September 1, the Soviet aircraft carrier Moskva passed through the Turkish Straits and into the Mediterranean, accompanied by two guided-missile destroyers. Over the next seven days the Soviet Navy gathered almost seventy surface ships – with uncounted submarines – and deployed between the Greek island of Crete and the point on the Libyan coastline where the Libyan and Egyptian border ran into the sea. That was fifty-four years ago in 1969 (lead image, bottom).

Ostensibly, the Soviet operation was to screen an amphibious troop landing exercise of Soviet, Egyptian and Syrian troops. In fact, the naval screen protected Libyan Army Captain Muammar Qaddafi and a dozen junior officer associates when, on September 1, 1969,  they successfully toppled the regime of Libyan King Idris and ended US occupation and control of Libya through the Wheelus Air Force Base.

Can the Palestinian operation, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which Hamas forces commenced on Saturday morning, continue for long enough to engage the Arab state militaries, the Iranian, US and Russian forces, to turn into a new war of the worlds, as the US and NATO war against Russia is on the Ukrainian battlefield? Will the US force, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and its five cruiser and destroyer escorts,   screen Israel as it orders emergency resupply of US arms and ammunition? Will it attempt to blockade the Arab coast – Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Egypt – to prevent resupply convoys from Turkey or Iran aiding the Palestinians?

“This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation and the last apartheid regime of earth,” the Hamas military commander, Mohammed Deif, has declared.    

Is this the final Israeli war of “mighty vengeance”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared, forcing all Palestinians in Gaza “to leave now”, and in the phrase of the spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “end the Gaza enclave”?

Is this the final Jewish solution to remove the Arabs from the territory according to the Basic Law, ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021,   which legalizes the takeover of Palestinian territory as a “natural” Jewish right. “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People,” the constitution enacted in 2018  by the Knesset declares, “in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.  The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”; and  “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.”  

Is this race war — is it now the war of the worlds?

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by Editor - Sunday, October 8th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Polish government is dragging its feet, closing its eyes, and covering its mouth over prosecution of Ukrainian war crimes against Poles, Jews, and Russians during the German war of 1939 to 1945.  

Officials reveal they are reluctant to pursue the Canadian Ukrainian Yaroslav Hunka (lead image, right) for war crimes against Poles and Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Hunka was a volunteer in the German-led SS unit, the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division. After it was routed by the Red Army at the Battle of Brody in July 1944, Hunka and the survivors fled southwest where the German SS command re-formed them in a new unit called the SS 14^th Grenadier Division; later the 1^st Ukrainian Division,  which in May 1945 surrendered to the British Army.  But not before the Ukrainians had operated against the anti-German partisans of Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria, where  investigations have identified more of their war crimes.*   

There is also more to the Polish government’s reluctance. It is a combination of misinformation, deliberate inaction, and camouflage to pacify Jewish communities in the US, Israel and Canada;  satisfy the Ukrainian diaspora of Canada led by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (lead image, left); and mislead Polish voters who go to the polls in ten days’ time.

The four Polish officials responsible for this deceit are the former prime minister Beata Szydlo; the current minister of education Przemysław Czarnek; the chief archivist and spokesman for the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Rafał Leśkiewicz, who is also an adviser to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki; and Poland’s ambassador to Canada in Ottawa, Witold Dzielski.

Despite their public statements about the Hunka case, they are Russia haters, proponents of the war against Russia, and defenders of the Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.

To obscure the contradiction between what the four have said publicly after Hunka was saluted by Zelensky and the Canadian parliament on September 22, and what they have done behind the scenes with senior officials in Warsaw, they are now covering up what Polish, British, Yugoslav, and Russian records already expose of Hunka’s wartime actions, along with those of the Galician units in which he participated.  

Cynically, the four Poles are proposing to request information and assistance from the two sources certain not to provide it,  the Canadian and Ukrainian governments; and make promises to the Polish media certain that journalists will ask no further questions.

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by Editor - Thursday, October 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Canada’s parliament, the Canadian Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) demonstrate what the other NATO allies keep trying to hide. They aim to reverse the outcome of World War II and resume Adolf Hitler’s operation to destroy Russia.

However, the fate of soldier Yaroslav Hunka of the SS Waffen Galician division,  whom the MPs, the chief of the Defence Staff, and the RCMP commissioner, saluted a few days ago for his exploits killing Jews and Poles in the Ternopil region of western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945,  now rests with two dossiers. One is in the archive of the Polish war crime prosecuting authority, the Institute of National Remembrance, in Warsaw. The second is the Soviet Army intelligence and KGB archives on the operations of Hunka’s unit before it fled a thousand kilometres southwest to Austria in order to surrender to the British Army.

“Beasts in human form with a red star on their foreheads,” Hunka has called the Russians whom he was afraid to fight.

His Jewish schoolmates in the Berezhany Gymnasium – 32 of them refugees from Poland – caused him to “wonder why they ran away in front of such a civilized Western people as the Germans.” They were all murdered by June 1943 when the town was declared Judenfrei.  Hunka remembered that time as “the happiest years of my life [dreaming] of the company of charming girls.”  

A year later, the Red Army launched its offensive against Lvov and in four weeks Hunka’s division was destroyed at Brody, 70 kilometres north of Hunka’s home.   Of 11,000 of the Galicians with Hunka in the battle of the Brody pocket, less than a third survived. He fled with the retreating Wehrmacht towards Graz, Austria. “It was now every man for himself”, a recent history of the Battle of Brody (lead image, July 14, 1944) has described the outcome for the Galicians.   

What Hunka had already done to the “charming” Jewish girls of Berezhany, and what he did when facing the Russians has been described by the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, in a script drafted by the Canadian Foreign Ministry, applauded by General Wayne Eyre, chief of the Defence Staff, as “heroic”.

With Hunka as their inspiration, the Canadian military wants to repeat this battle against “the beasts with a red star on their foreheads” — this time with the Canadian Jewish community for allies, one of them the Leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould. But she and her fellow government ministers must now decide whether to block Polish and Russian requests for assistance in documenting Hunka’s war record from Canadian, British and US military intelligence files. If they refuse, they will be protecting Hunka from prosecution for the war crimes in the Ukraine they declare they know nothing about, in order to improve themselves on Hunka’s performance at Brody seventy-nine years ago.  

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by Editor - Monday, October 2nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

North Bay, Ontario, is a small Canadian city of immigrants from Europe, their upwardly mobile children, and their children’s children.  

It’s the town where Yaroslav Hunka (lead image) lives after he left the  British prisoner of war camp where he and other Ukrainian soldiers of the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division were held after the end of fighting in Europe in 1945. North Bay is where his son Martin Hunka was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company. By North Bay standards, the Hunka family is better educated and wealthier than most, donating substantial sums of money to the local hospital, universities, and Ukrainian national organisations, and through the Redpath mining company to local politicians.   

North Bay is also where the children of these men demonstrate Hitler salutes and Nazi Party slogans on the local high school football field.  

This is the model of small-town church-going people of modest but respectable means who share the prevailing ideology of their homeland grandparents who were on the side of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Stepan Bandera in the last world war. The smiles remain the same, the stand-up stiff-arm salutes have changed. The minds remain fixed where they were in their grandparents’ ideology – that was the collective fascism of a century ago.* These people continue to believe that for their liberation, the Russian race should be destroyed – “suffocated” is the state policy term used by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Joly.  

The churches they attend organised a rally for this goal at the North Bay City Hall featuring statements by the two Hunkas; they were St. Andrew’s United, Trinity United, Emmanuel United Church, and Omond  Memorial United Church. “Nothing has changed,” Yaroslav Hunka said at what the churches called a “peace vigil”. “The same enemy. First Stalin was there and now this idiot. But Ukraine is not by itself like it was before. The whole world knows about Ukraine and the whole world supports Ukraine and that is very important.”

Martin Hunka added: “I think the support in Canada, the support around the world has been fantastic. At least now we have friends, whether that is going to translate into anything concrete on the ground, I think it already is.”  

This is the town where the first Italian to become Speaker of the House of Commons in Ottawa  ran a business and collected election campaign donations. That’s Anthony Rota, the man who invited the two Hunka men to be guests in the Speaker’s Gallery during the speech of Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky on September 22.  Rota and the government’s leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould, arranged for the two Hunka men to be seated in the front row of the gallery next to the leaders of Canada’s military and internal security forces, General Wayne Eyre, the chief of the Defence Staff, and Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bryan Larkin, protected by two armed bodyguards.

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by Editor - Monday, October 2nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In January of this year the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported the reserves of the nine leading countries in the world which mine lithium, the new fuel to power electric batteries. Chile led, followed by Australia, Argentina, China, and the US which claims to have one million tonnes. Russia was left out of the USGS chart.

Russian sources report its lithium reserves are currently between 3.5 million and 5 million tonnes;  that’s at least three times more than the US.  The US is also much more limited in its capacity to develop new domestic lithium mines compared to Russia.  Bolivia was also omitted from the US Government chart because its reserves were called unproven resources. In fact and in the ground, Bolivia leads the lithium world with 21 million tonnes.

The difference between what USGS reports and what happens next isn’t the distinction in geologists’ terminology between reserves and resources. It’s US Government policy to stop, sabotage and destroy Russia’s ability to meet its lithium requirement from its own, domestic sources, or by importing from friendly countries like Bolivia.

In response, a new plan for combining lithium mining projects in Bolivia and Russia will produce a surplus of Russia’s foreseeable requirement for lithium battery production. But not only that. Allied in technology sharing, investment, trade, and political agreement, the two countries will protect each other in the conservation of the lithium market. If everything goes according to plan, Russia, Bolivia, and the three BRICS states – Argentina, Brazil and China – will dominate the trade in global lithium. They are already discussing the formation of a collective marketing organisation – a lithium OPEC.

Unless the US can stop them.

In the latest official paper issued by the State Department on July 23, “the bilateral relationship between the United States and Bolivia” is “strained. Despite these challenges, the United States maintains a strong and respectful relationship with the Bolivian people, with whom we work to advance human rights, entrepreneurship, and cultural and educational initiatives…However, the United States remains concerned by anti-democratic actions and the politicization of the legal system.”

This is how the lithium war is starting.

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by Editor - Thursday, September 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer
  @bears_with

In the war at sea between the US-NATO alliance and Russia, the Russian shipping company Sovcomflot says its future has never been better. The US State Department directing the sanctions campaign against Russian oil and gas exports says the future for the Russian trade is never again. Both of them are right.

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by Editor - Monday, September 25th, 2023
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