By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Belgium has decided to host its second Battle of Waterloo in two hundred and eight years, this time on Napoleon’s side. But on this occasion it won’t be, as the Duke of Wellington claimed before, a “close run thing”.

In the last episode  of the Napoleon-sized mistakes the US and NATO are making in their sanctions war against Russia, the battleground was at sea. There, the sanctions war has transformed the global movement of oil and gas tankers – the routes, ports, insurance, contracts, pricing, certification, and recording.  The major commercial and state fleets have now split into two blocs, ending the unified global tanker market and returning to the conditions of secrecy, smuggling, and bypass port hubs last seen in Europe when Napoleon attempted to impose his blockade of British merchantmen in what was called the “Continental System” at the time.  That was more than two hundred years ago, between 1806 and 1814.

France did not recover from the damage the over-confident Napoleon did to the French position in Europe’s seaborne trade.   Napoleon multiplied the cost of his misjudgement by deciding that, in order to enforce his blockade, he should invade Spain, Portugal and Russia, and close their ports. Russia then buried Napoleon twice — once in Moscow in 1812, then in Paris in 1814, before he and the French army were finished off at Waterloo. This time round, the US-NATO blockade of the Russian tanker trade is Napoleonic in the obviousness of the miscalculation; it is also Napoleonic in the magnitude of losses on the NATO side — and the acceleration of profits on the Russian side.

In today’s new episode, the battleground is the diamond trade based in Antwerp, Belgium.

Almost $14 billion worth of diamonds are imported annually for cutting, polishing, and trading there, and about the same value is exported.  In their rough form, most of the diamonds in the Belgian market have been mined in Russia, and either sent direct to the Antwerp diamond market, or indirectly through India. Most of the diamonds exported from Antwerp have been going to India, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Israel. The Israeli diamond processing business exports mostly to the US jewellery market.

The diamond trade in Europe has traditionally been a Jewish operation; until the Germans arrived in 1940 that was based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, for four hundred years. German race hatred wiped out the Jews of Amsterdam; Belgian race hatred for Russians is about to wipe out the Antwerp diamond market.  The Jewish business is about to become an Arab one. As one Antwerp diamantaire described the situation, “if the Belgian government thinks it’s giving the finger to the Russians, all that will happen is that the diamond on that finger will move, and the finger will be what Dubai will be pointing.”

Martin Rapaport’s price sheet for the trade in Tel Aviv and New York reports that in Belgium “sentiment [is] very low. Serious concerns for coming months. 0.50 and 1 ct. [carat] diamonds especially weak due to sluggish US orders. Many hope holiday activity will kickstart trading. Uncertainty surrounds Russian diamonds as fresh sanctions loom.”  

Rapaport, a dual Israeli-American citizen and self-reported “world’s largest and most trusted marketplace for diamonds & jewelry”,   has been promoting fresh sanctions against Russian diamonds to cut the volume of Russian rough in the global market; these have been causing diamond inventories to overflow, diamond prices to fall, and Israeli margins to shrink. “Russia was the wild card in 2022. Whereas it was assumed the sanctions imposed in February by the US on Russian-sourced diamonds would lead to shortages, the goods continued to enter the market — propping up polished inventories.”  

Rapaport’s fix is heavier US artillery in the war against Russian diamonds.

 “There is a need,” he editorialised on July 12, “to address the issue of ‘substantial transformation’ — a pathway through which the current US sanctions still allow Russian-origin rough diamonds to enter the US if they are cut and polished in a third country, as explained by the Jewelers Vigilance Committee (JVC). The Group of Seven (G7) nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US — are working on measures that will require companies to disclose the origin of their diamond imports, both rough and polished.”  

Rapaport was endorsing the attack on the Belgians by Vladimir Zelensky of the Ukraine, speaking to the Belgian parliament: “There are people”, he said, “for whom the diamonds sold in Antwerp are more important than the battle we are waging.”  

Following Rapaport at the end of August, Brad Brooks-Rubin of the US State Department’s Office of Sanctions Coordination and career Russia diamond-fighter,  announced that consumption of Russian diamonds must be stopped in the G7 nations, which currently account for almost 70% of all diamond purchases. “By cutting off most of their demand, if an import ban were to be agreed, Russian diamonds would have a narrower lane through which to work their way into the marketplace,” he said. “The focus of all discussions is how to target Alrosa and Russia’s diamond revenues that could then be funneled to their war efforts.”  Like Rapaport, Brooks-Rubin is also a dual national.  

In New York three weeks later, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander De Croo followed with an announcement of his new sanctions plan against Russian diamonds: “Russian diamonds are blood diamonds,” he said. Beginning January 1, 2024, “the G7 has a goal of banning Russian diamonds from the market. [We still must go] the final mile. We are extremely happy to play a role in this [effort]. We are a partner in this.” The new sanction, he said, is “good and strong and makes sure that we don’t have to have second thoughts about what is being sold.”

The plan is that anyone importing rough or polished diamonds into a G7 country, including the US, would be required to declare on their invoices that their shipments do not contain Russian diamonds, either original rough from Russia or processed in a third country. The plan puts Russian rough on a par with the so-called “conflict” or “blood” diamonds from Africa and Kimberley Process, which have been under source and invoice tracking for twenty years.   

De Croo is no Napoleon. He is losing control of a weak coalition of minority government parties; his own party, the Open VLD (Flemish Liberals and Democrats), has dwindled in the polls to single digits since the beginning of the year; he faces oblivion when the Belgian election is called next June.  The diamantaires of Antwerp are viewed in this election as carpetbaggers,  not Belgians.

Portraying the new anti-Russian diamond move as a “European Union” initiative won’t save the plan or De Croo, Belgian sources comment. They believe the global diamond market will be split into two blocs, and what will remain for Antwerp will be the diminishing, high-cost market of Europeans and Americans. When they are defeated on the Ukrainian battlefield, the sources expect Antwerp will not recover, and Dubai will boom.

“I cannot see [the new sanction plan] working, especially for polished,” adds a leading London diamantaire. “How will polished be traced as Russian? Despite the so-called technology it won’t happen, as people will dream up ways around.”

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by Editor - Sunday, September 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Everybody should know by now that bulls are colour blind. They don’t like or dislike the colour red. They are threatened and so they charge, not at the red, but at the waving of the cape, whatever its colour, or at the bull fighter moving around the ring.  Bulls are perceptive – they can tell the difference between an armed man and his camouflage.  

Since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party,  the Russian communists have not been as astute.

Like men, bulls grow less intelligent, more stubborn and miscalculating with age. This is also a problem for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) whose leader, Gennady Zyuganov (lead image, left), has recently turned 79 years of age. He is compos mentis compared to the similarly aged leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties in the White House and US Congress. But that’s not saying much – not enough to have persuaded Russian voters to support the KPRF candidates in the regional, gubernatorial,  and mayoral elections which were held across the country between September 8 and 10.

This month the KPRF polled significantly more poorly than it had done at the last regional elections in 2018, although it retained its two governors, Valentinin Konovalov in Khakassia and Andrei Klychkov in Oryol; they have the advantage of incumbency, and were first elected in 2018. Communist Party support in the new Donbass regions was poor; 11% was their second place result in Kherson; they ran third in the three other Donbass region polls.

United Russia, the government party, did significantly better than in 2018, taking majorities in the legislative assembles of the regions, and a two-thirds vote countrywide.

A KPRF spokesman claimed the war is the reason for the communist defeat. “In 2018, there was the [government’s] increase in the retirement age and the rise of the pension protest movement which affected our results. Now the situation is reversed – [there is the] special military operation and society is consolidated [around the government].”  

In fact, voters viewed the KPRF as having no policy differences with President Vladimir Putin on any significant issue.  “Except in Khakassia,” according to one source, “the Communist Party doesn’t really exist.” Even there, the source concedes, the government’s United Russia party withdrew from the gubernatorial race, and the party took the majority of seats in the regional legislature.  

Zyuganov insists the KPRF still leads the opposition in the country. “We need to realise that this war has been declared against the entire Russian world, our civilisation,” Zyuganov says in an interview published on the party website on Monday.  

“So we have only one way out — to win a complete and unconditional victory. But to do this, it is necessary to correctly assess the current situation, understand our strengths and weaknesses — and resolutely go on the offensive. It is necessary to unite society as much as possible, to mobilise resources, to master all the most advanced and freshest. And to be able to do it in conditions of unprecedented sanctions.” 

“Putin has changed his strategy four times over the past twenty years. He came to power after the ‘dashing 1990s’, during which more than 80,000 enterprises were destroyed and sold off, citizens’ savings were blown to the wind, and the Soviet government was shot. In the 1990s, the country turned itself into Uncle Sam’s wagging tail and decided to turn into an oil and gas pipe, a quarry,  and a sawmill. But Putin realised it was necessary to change the strategy… But the remnants of the Yeltsin era [remain] in power. They still occupy many offices in the Kremlin and the government…”

“Putin made a very interesting and informative speech at the Fareastern Forum.    But I would like to pay special attention to the part of his speech that concerned tax legislation. The oligarchy breathed a sigh of relief — the president says we will not change the situation with taxes. But of all the twenty leading countries in the world, only we have a flat tax scale, in which the same percentage of income is collected from both the poor and the leading rich! This is absolutely unfair and directly contradicts the interests of the state. Thanks to this policy, the oligarchs do not pay normal taxes…They continue to plunder the country at an unprecedented pace. In 2022 alone, $261 billion was transferred from Russia abroad. The total capital of our 25 richest oligarchs has already exceeded $ 300 billion. This is more than the entire Russian budget!  And all this happens in the conditions of the special military operation, when help, support, and compassion are needed! When maximum consolidation and cohesion is needed!”   

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by Editor - Tuesday, September 19th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The US-led sanctions war against Russian fossil fuel exports, especially oil, has been the best thing to have happened to Sovcomflot, Russia’s leading shipping company and operator of the world’s largest oil and gas tanker fleets.

Revenues are up, earnings and profits are multiplying; Sovcomflot has never had so much cash in the bank; its debt is down to the lowest level in more than twenty years – and none of it is in American or European bank hands.

Released on August 28 and expressed in discreet language, the new company financial report says: “Revenues from tanker business segments (transportation of crude oil and petroleum products) are supported by favourable market conditions against the background of increased demand for tanker tonnage, taking into account the changing geography of international trade in oil and petroleum products. Despite the presence of a seasonal reduction in freight rates in the summer, the company believes that the market fundamentals, including the limited growth of the global tanker fleet due to the small number of orders for the construction of new vessels, suggests a high probability of stability in the medium term of freight rates at a level above the historically average.”

“Favourable market conditions” is Sovcomflot’s phrase for the US and NATO sanctions, first imposed on Sovcomflot’s financing and payment operations in February 2022, and escalated this year in European Union (EU) and UK sanctions targeting Dubai and Hong Kong fleet management companies. The reference to “changing geography” means what shipping experts and analysts from London to Oslo, Piraeus to Singapore acknowledge privately: “The war is good, very good for the oil tanker companies which can run the gauntlet of the Americans”, says a Greek source. The international shipping media are fearful of reporting this publicly.

London-based shipping publications like Lloyds List,  sold by the London-listed Informa group to the Montagu investor group, are not reporting what their industry sources agree is happening. “Some people tend to close doors behind them”, a veteran maritime news reporter coyly describes the news blackout. Seatrade, another Informa outlet, is restricting its reporting to NATO tracking of sanctions busting.  

US maritime media like GCaptain (California) and Marine Money (Connecticut) refuse to respond to questions about their news blackout. Equally quiet, although for different reasons, are the Indian, Chinese and Singaporean shipping press.  

Sovcomflot is now confidently predicting the worldwide split between the Russian and US- NATO fleets will continue for the foreseeable future. “Despite the presence of a seasonal reduction in freight rates in the summer, the company believes that the fundamental market fundamentals, including the limited growth of the global tanker fleet due to the small number of orders for the construction of new vessels, suggests a high probability of stability in the medium term of freight rates at a level above the historically average.”

Never better – that’s what the last phrase means in Russian.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the very long history of men and women who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; miss the forest for the trees; and turn a molehill of profit into a mountain of loss, the US, British and German attempt to stop the tankers which carry Russian oil and gas to market is an exceptional  failure.

It’s exceptional  in the same way, and for the same reason of strategic miscalculation that Napoleon’s “Continental System” failed to destroy British trade with Europe – but destroyed the French economy instead. That was 217 years ago – France has never recovered from the damage the over-confident, miscalculating Napoleon did to the French position in Europe’s seaborne trade.  

Napoleon multiplied the catastrophic cost of his misjudgement by deciding that, in order to stop the smuggling and bypass trade, and enforce his blockade, he should invade Spain, Portugal and Russia, and close their ports. Russia then buried Napoleon twice — once in Moscow in 1812, then in Paris in 1814, before he and the French army were finished off by others at Waterloo.

This time round, the NATO blockade of the Russian maritime trade is Napoleonic in the obviousness of the miscalculation; it is also Napoleonic in the refusal to acknowledge defeat.

So stubborn is this American blindness that even the Greek shipowners, stalwart defenders of the US occupation of Greece since 1945, cannot resist cashing in on the profits to be made from carrying Russian oil and gas across the sea.  This is despite every attempt the arch US coup plotter, Geoffrey Pyatt – now State Department inspector of “energy resources”, formerly US ambassador to Athens and before that US ambassador to Kiev —  is making to persuade, deter,  threaten, and hurt them.  

The defeat of the war against Russia on the land has yet to reach its Waterloo.  The US, British and German idea of escalating the war on the Dnieper River battlefields westwards to Kiev and Lvov will become as obvious as Waterloo in a few months’ time.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It must be the sea air at Vladivostok that causes temporary clumsiness and misspeaking on the part of President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) during the carefully orchestrated question-and-answer session of the annual Far Eastern Economic Forum.

At the forum in September 2018, asked about British government and media reports of two Russian military intelligence soldiers using Novichok to attack Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Putin said he knew their names and denied they were GRU agents. “Of course, they are civilians,” he said in Vladivostok.

Again in Vladivostok on Tuesday this week, asked about Anatoly Chubais (right), the former Kremlin chief of staff and privatisation chief during the Yeltsin administration who has moved to Israel, Putin referred to him as “Moshe Israelevich”. Putin added: “the fact [is] that Anatoly Borisovich is hiding there [Israel] for some reason… I was shown some kind of photo from the Internet, where he is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, but some kind of Moshe Israelevich, lives there somewhere… Why he’s doing this, I don’t understand why he ran away.”  

The US government propaganda agency and the Russian opposition have called Putin anti-Semitic for referring to Israel and calling Chubais “Moshe Israelevich”.

They were ignoring the context and Putin’s complimentary remarks about other Russian runaways to Israel, before he got to Chubais.

So was Putin misspeaking, or was he launching his presidential re-election campaign by trying to reassure two opposing blocs of Russians – the majority of voters who have long regarded Chubais as one of the most hated politicians in the country; and the Russian oligarchs for whom the current investigation of Chubais for billion-dollar theft of state funds is a harbinger of their own fate?

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by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command bunker he thought was secret. Then you can check the life expectancy of a Russian pig.

The losses of the former are Russia’s tactical gains; they aren’t yet victory in the war.

But it’s the latter, the Russian pig who, upon turning into pork, is breaking through the enemy’s defences towards strategic victory of Russian economic power to capture a world market. This means defeat – unrecoverable loss of market share – for the hostile states led by the once powerful pork exporters, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and the US. As the most recent European Union pig and pork slaughter data show,  the war is pushing up the energy and feed costs of pig farming,  and drastically cutting European exports of pork to the Asian consumer market, the biggest in the world. Also now, the Chinese government is on the point of deciding who to favour if Beijing allows a limited lifting of the African Swine Fever (ASF) ban  — the Russian pig or European and American pigs.

Behind the Ukraine front, the test of who is winning the war against Russia is also who puts their money and their meat where their mouth is. In Russia, meat consumption is rising per capita to a level never recorded before in Russian history.  At the same time, the country has become the world’s fifth largest pork producer.

“Practically speaking,” says Yury Kovalev, “we no longer have imports, but not because this is closed, but because over the past fifteen years an entire industry has been created, production has grown every year, and we have almost completely abandoned import dependence.”  Kovalev is general director of Russia’s National Union of Pig Breeders.

“For us, export is now the main direction for growth. Back in 2019-2020, Russia reached about 200,000 tonnes of exports, which is about 5% of our total production. In 2023, the export of pig products can reach 220,000 to 230,000 tonnes. The main strategic challenge of the Russian pig industry in the next ten years is to enter the top-5 of world pork exporters. To [achieve that] it is necessary to double exports to at least 350,000 to 400,000 tonnes; that’s up to 10% of domestic production.”

On current projections, Russia’s pork exporters expect that by the end of 2025 – one year beyond the battlefield defeat of the Ukro-NATO forces – the profitability of Russia’s pig exporting companies will depend on rising export demand, especially in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. This, the exporters say, will require accelerated growth in grain output to feed the pigs, which in turn depends on low to stable fertilizer, fuel, other energy and grain prices.

These are Russia’s strategic advantages in the present war. They are killing the profit margins and competitive advantages of the US-NATO side, and forcing the allied states to trade between themselves. This is the thin end of the NATO sausage.

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by Editor - Tuesday, September 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a London courtroom last week, lawyers for the British government and the presiding judge, Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image, centre), revealed they will resist the efforts of the Dawn Sturgess family to obtain a multi-million pound settlement in compensation for what they claim, and the government says, was her death five years ago from Novichok poisoning by Russian state agents.

Secrecy is the key, not only to the big money claim, but to the government’s aim to defeat it and at the same time preserve the official story that the Kremlin ordered and carried out the chemical warfare attack in England in 2018.   

Lord Hughes is defending the government’s effort to keep secret enough of the evidence in the case to block Adam Straw KC (lead image, left) and Michael Mansfield KC (right),  the Sturgess family lawyers, from demonstrating that the British security services should have known in advance – and did know enough — to have protected Sturgess from the Russian cause of her death. Their argument has been that for this negligence a very large sum of money should be paid to Sturgess’s heirs, to Rowley, and to the lawyers.

The judge, the government, and the lawyers have agreed, however, there is one secret they must all keep. Sergei Skripal, the original target and survivor of the Novichok attack allegations in the official narrative, must never be allowed to testify publicly to what he knows.

To cover this up, Straw, Mansfield, and a lawyer representing the British press lied in court last week, claiming they want “open justice” from the secret services and the police. According to Jude Bunting KC  representing the media, “open justice is about avoiding ill-informed speculation about proceedings and, insofar as material is in the public domain because of assertion, or even because of state-sponsored [Russian] misinformation, that is all the more reason for disclosing that material in open rather than in closed.”

Hughes claimed to be seeking the same openness.  “One of the difficulties of this inquiry and this case…is that everybody popularly supposes that they know the answer. They may or may not be right, but the purpose of the inquiry is to find out.” Hughes was pretending.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 10th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On March 5, in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), there was a fire-bombing of a French–owned brewery which destroyed 50,000 bottles of beer. On August 23, a private jet of the Wagner Group was bombed in the air north of Moscow, and the Wagner leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, were killed, along with five of their associates and three flight crew.

The connection between the two incidents is that Prigozhin’s methods of doing business in Africa cost him his life in Russia. The African business, not the mutiny at Rostov on June 23-24, is the fatal link.

It was the last straw. This is not a case of a soldier who lived by the sword and died by the sword. It’s the gangster who thought he was the capo dei capi, boss of bosses; and was brought down to earth because he wasn’t. To ignore the warnings that he had reached his multi-billion dollar operating limit, that he should stop muscling in on the competition, retire and keep his money  — these are well-known rules of American business, not to say mafia rules. But Prigozhin followed Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky in thinking Russian business is different. They thought there was no limit to their power to get what they wanted.

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by Editor - Tuesday, September 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

What’s the truth of how Putin rules Russia?  

The longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia has followed Putin since their first meeting in St Petersburg in November 1991. This is the Putin story which has taken more than thirty years to prepare. It’s the story which the western and Russian media have missed.

Based on thousands of pages of court testimony in London and Moscow;  76 days of cross-examination of witnesses, including the only Russian minister of state ever to go into the High Court witness box; and the findings of fact and law by thirteen British judges up to the UK Supreme Court, this is the only book to investigate the truth.  

And to reveal how it bears no resemblance to US and NATO war propaganda.

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by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Doctors in hospitals for the criminally insane have reported that the sharpest pain patients with superiority complexes suffer is the belief there are others who are more superior than they are. Unless they are stopped, they kill to cure.

US exceptionalism is a disease of this type.  The American exceptionalists believe that if the US isn’t conquering and victorious —  great again as in MAGA —  it is defeating itself because, they think, the US can never be beaten by a foreign adversary on the field —   not on the battlefield, nor in the marketplace, nor in the mind and on the page. So this is where the whitecoats arrive today:  the Russian General Staff and the Stavka  are defeating the Americans on every front, weapon system, intelligence summary, and mind. This has never happened before. Failing to see and understand this is delusional; those who kill to cure this aren’t all hospitalised.

A book repeating the US, NATO and Ukrainian version of how and why Russia’s Ukrainian battlefield campaign began on February 23, 2022, is symptomatic, nothing new. “We have no idea of exactly how the conflict will end”, concludes Owen Matthews (aka Bibikov) in a fresh publication from the state-subsidised printing press of Rupert Murdoch. But “we already know how it will not end. There will be no complete victory for either Russia or Ukraine. NATO is too invested to allow Kyiv to fall to the Russian army… this war will eventually end — with a negotiated peace.”*

Incomprehensible to Matthews is that the terms of the negotiated peace will be those of the Russian non-aggression treaties for the US and for NATO of December 17, 2021,  and they will be dictated at the end of the war by the force which prevails. They will be as definitive as the German terms signed by the French in the Compiègne Wagon on June 22, 1940;   and the American terms signed by the Japanese on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.  

Instead, Matthews dismisses the treaties in two paragraphs, based on what Matthews says an anonymous British Foreign Office official told him in March 2022 was “fantastical…[they] simply did make any sense…there was nothing in it that NATO could possibly agree to.”

What preceded, and also what followed those treaties, was the doing, in Matthews’s  psychopathological terminology, of “fantasies about anti-Russian fascists coming to power in Kyiv”; “paranoia over Western attempts to subvert and undermine Russia”; and other “lies and eschatological fantasies”. At the centre of this madness, according to Matthews, is the single figure of Vladimir Putin, advised by “Soviet-era fantasists and paranoiacs”; “on the point of paranoia about the [corona] virus”; “secluded and inaccessible in his Covid bunker”; obsessed by pseudo-historical revenge and “a kind of death cult”; surrounded by “the most deluded and most ideologically driven members of Putin’s entourage”; and speechifying “a set of unbelievably illiterate  conspiracy clichés…especially when the former Marxists in the Kremlin sincerely believed that inexorable historical forces were on their side.”

There is no question in Matthews’s diagnosis of who is in the madhouse, and who is superior. “By the time I met [Vladimir] Zelensky in Kyiv in July [2022] he cut a profoundly impressive figure – hard-eyed, emphatic in his speech.”

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by Editor - Sunday, September 3rd, 2023
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