By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin’s past tense is also the future tense.

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

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

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

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

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by Editor - Monday, June 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In brief statements issued late last week in Moscow – their significance missed in the western press — President Vladimir Putin ordered a reality check of Russia’s war strategy. He then  answered himself by declaring the war will be over when no Ukrainian army will be left on the battlefield, nor NATO weapons.  

The Foreign Ministry answered by pointing out that Russia does not recognize there is a legal Ukrainian state because the reality is that the mutual recognition treaty between Russia and the Ukraine was cancelled by Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky in 2018 and 2019.  

“We can conclude,” Putin said at the Security Council meeting on Thursday morning,  “that they can certainly send in additional equipment, but the mobilisation reserve is not unlimited. And Ukraine’s Western allies really seem determined to fight with Russia to the last Ukrainian. At the same time, we must proceed from the fact that the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused, and I ask you to keep this in mind when making fighting strategies. You need to proceed from reality.”

Putin was following by a few hours the statement by the Foreign Ministry that Russia does not recognize the legal sovereignty of the regime in Kiev, and that following the cancellation of the treaty between the Ukraine and Russia in 2019, there will be no Ukrainian state left to sign an end-of-war agreement.

At her weekly briefing of reporters, the ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova, was asked “when will Russia initiate a legal procedure to terminate the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty?” Zakharova answered:  “The procedure for terminating the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty is hampered by the absence of such a treaty. In Article 1 of the Treaty on the Principles of Relations between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR of November 19, 1990, the two republics recognised each other as ‘sovereign states.’ The 1990 treaty was then replaced by the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine of May 31, 1997 (Article 39),  which was denounced by Ukraine and terminated on April 1, 2019.”

No army, no state. But the war will continue because it is the one between the US and the NATO powers and Russia. That too will have an ending, but longer.

“If [NATO Secretary-General] Mr Stoltenberg again says on behalf of NATO that they are against freezing the conflict in Ukraine,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said  on June 21,    “this means that they want to fight. So let them fight. We are ready for that. We realised NATO’s true goals in Ukraine some time ago as their plans took shape over the years that followed the coup. Today, NATO is attempting to implement them…they are directly involved in the hybrid and hot war declared on Russia.”

I am reminded, Lavrov added, “of a Soviet-era joke noting that the Soviet Union is located too close to US military bases.” The Soviet Union was dismantled, but the war continues against Russia. It will end when the US is pushed to a safe distance.  How safe, Putin asked Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to explain in answer to two questions?

Putin’s question: “we know that the enemy is to receive additional Western equipment. What does the Defence Ministry think about threats in this connection?”

Shoigu’s answer: “All arsenals, accumulated by the Soviet Union and countries of the former socialist bloc, have now been virtually depleted. We can say the same about former Ukrainian resources… the amount, due to be delivered throughout 2023, as well as those weapons that have already been delivered, will not seriously affect the course of hostilities. Additionally, most of the armoured vehicles and fighting vehicles belong to the previous generation, or even to an earlier generation. On the one hand, their armour is weak and ineffective, compared to modern equipment. Mr President, we do not see any threats here.”

Question: “Mr Shoigu, what is the percentage of Western equipment out of the equipment that has been destroyed since June 4, which Mr Patrushev has just reported giving generalised data? Approximately.”

Answer: “Of the 246 tanks destroyed, 13 were Western made. At the same time, it should be noted that, if we consider the equipment that was delivered, tanks in particular: 81 Western-made tanks have been delivered. Of the 81 Western tanks, 13 [16%] have been destroyed. Of the armoured fighting vehicles, 59 Western ones have been destroyed. To date, Western countries have supplied Ukraine with an estimated 109 Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Of the 109 BFVs, 18 [17%] have been destroyed. Overall, 59 Western-made armoured vehicles have been destroyed. As for field artillery and guns, here, of course, I can estimate right away that out of the 48 pieces destroyed, about 30 percent were Western made.”

The “reality”, Putin concluded publicly, not for Shoigu or the General Staff, is that the percentage of NATO weapons destroyed on the battlefield will rise sharply because “the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused.” When those reserves are defeated, there will be neither NATO arms nor Ukrainian men left.

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by Editor - Saturday, June 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Without the public support of any political figure in Russia, military or police unit, regional governor, or the officers of his Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his thousand rank-and-filers have agreed to return to their base camps on terms negotiated late on Saturday afternoon between Prigozhin and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus President.

The one-armed rebellion has failed with recriminations, immunity from prosecution, and  almost no bloodshed. The Kremlin solution has followed the precedent of General Alexander Lebed’s (lead image, centre) rebellion against President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, not the violent end of the rebellion of Yemelyan Pugachev (left) of 1773-75.

Dmitry Rogozin, who was one of the strategists of Lebed’s campaign for the presidency and later became a deputy prime minister under President Vladimir Putin,  made the difference clear in a statement he issued early on Saturday, before Putin spoke at 10 o’clock. “I know the situation at the front as well as Prigozhin and I have never hidden my position, but whatever the explanation for an armed rebellion, it is still an armed rebellion in the rear of a belligerent army. In a war, you have to shove your political ambitions up your ass and support the front with all your might. Any attempts to weaken it are nothing but aiding the enemy.”

Another of Lebed’s comrades of 27 years ago, Sergei Glazyev, followed with a repudiation of Prigozhin of his own. None of the well-known critics of Putin on domestic policy, nor the military bloggers who have attacked the tactical management and strategic priorities of the Special Military Operation, supported Prigozhin.

The rebellion, according to sources speaking on Saturday evening, involved advance planning by Prigozhin and several hundred of the lowest ranks of his military group. There was no support among the Wagner officers. After they had moved on Rostov, then took the road to Voronezh and on towards Moscow, the road columns numbered several hundred, with a total across the southwest of no more than four thousand.

A statement issued by Lukashenko’s office in Minsk at 8 in the evening said the rebellion was at an end.  “This morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed his Belarusian counterpart about the situation in the south of Russia with the private military company Wagner. The heads of State agreed on joint actions. As a follow-up to the agreements, the President of Belarus, having further clarified the situation through his own channels, in coordination with the President of Russia, held talks with the head of the Wagner PMCS [private military companies], Yevgeny Prigozhin.”

“The negotiations lasted throughout the day. As a result, we came to an agreement on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia. Yevgeny Prigozhin accepted the proposal of the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko to stop the movement of armed persons of the Wagner company on the territory of Russia and further steps to de-escalate tension. At the moment, there is an absolutely profitable and acceptable solution to the situation on the table, with security guarantees for the fighters of the Wagner PMCs.”

A well-informed Moscow source says:  “The whole thing was planned for several weeks. Soldiers and unit sergeants might be on board. Officers, obviously not. That makes it a mutiny against commanders. I do not think Prigozhin will go quietly. He will try and romanticize himself as a Pugachev and his assassins as peasants defending Russia from oligarchs. Questions will be asked when and which men were already inside of Rostov Military HQ. Perhaps some advance parties were inside.”

There is no publication yet of Lukashenko’s terms which Prigozhin has accepted for himself. Unconfirmed reports in Moscow indicate he will leave the country for Africa with one of the Wagner units operating there. His media, communications, and internet networks have been blocked.

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by Editor - Saturday, June 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Since the Ukrainian abrogation of the  Istanbul non-aggression and neutrality agreement of March 2022, which President Vladimir Putin displayed to a delegation of African leaders last Saturday, one thing has been clear. The pact to end this war will be drafted and signed by Ukrainian soldiers who have been defeated in the field, not by civilian politicians who are paid and instructed by Washington.  

The terms will be dictated by Russian soldiers. They will calculate the distances to be covered by long-range NATO artillery and missile launches on Russian territory, and of Ukrainian terrorist attacks into Russian regions. These are military facts the Russian General Staff have a long history of calculating, plotting them on maps and reinforcing the depth of defence and control lines – as long ago as the Soviet Army war against the US-backed Afghan mujahideen.

Since last November, when this website published first maps of a demilitarized zone for the Ukrainian territory, the depth of the Russian defence lines has been moving steadily westward. As each of the Ukrainian strategic reserves – units newly trained and armed by the US and NATO states – are committed to battle and fail, their retreat leaves all of the remaining Ukrainian territory open to a Russian advance.  

What follows is the first detailed discussion in the open in Moscow of how the map of this territory should be drawn when the Ukrainian offensive reaches its end, and the Russian advance begins.   

Left out of mention is who in Moscow will be drawing the new map. This is because Putin has annonced he is delegating to the General Staff.  “Russia’s military leadership,” he said on June 9, “is realistic in its assessments of the situation and will proceed from these realities as it continues to plan up our actions in the short term.”

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had already said the same a year ago. “Now the geography is different,” he concluded an interview in Moscow on July 20, 2022.   “Take the HIMARS. [Ukrainian] Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.”

“[Question:] How can this be arranged, technically? This is our territory. Then there are the republics that will accede to us. In fact they already have – the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. … Further west, there is the territory controlled by Vladimir Zelensky. They have a common border. So either there should be a 300 kilometre buffer zone or something between them, or we need to march all the way to Lvov inclusive.”

“[Lavrov:] There is a solution to this problem. The military know this.”

“Comrade servicemen,” Lavrov added last week on a visit to the 201st Russian Military Base in Tajikistan, “they are getting ready, in earnest, to supply the F-16 jets. Some say they will make two squadrons available, others say eight. They are gearing up to continue the escalation of the war against us. There’s an ongoing debate about where these planes will take off from. Our armed forces and the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces are well aware of ongoing developments and report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. We must keep in mind that one version of the F-16 can carry nuclear weapons. If they do not understand this, they are worthless military strategists and planners.”  

The General Staff have no reason to speak publicly on this point.

Privately, a source in a position to know says: “the General Staff are not satisfied with the Dnieper [line of defence]. It will run from a small town on the border with Belarus to Transnistria. They will solve that problem as well. But mainly, Belarus has to be protected from the south. And most importantly, that leaves nothing of the Ukraine except the territory which the Poles and Hungarians might not be bold enough to take.”

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 20th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Jack Teixeira (lead image, left), the US Air Force national guardsman arrested on espionage allegations in April, is scheduled to appear in a Boston federal court for his arraignment on the prosecution’s charges this Wednesday, June 21.  

Six counts were listed in the grand jury indictment filed in court on June 15. The 10-page paper reveals new evidence contradicting the case against Teixeira which has been published in the mainstream media based on official government leaks to the Bellingcat propaganda organization and the New York Times, which are working together against Teixeira and against the intelligence disclosures attributed to him.  

The new court evidence is now pointing to the likelihood that Teixeira’s access to highly classified documents prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (lead image, right) at the end of February this year had been facilitated for him by senior US Air Force (USAF) officials.

If provable, Teixeira will plead not guilty and his lawyers will prepare the defence case of entrapment. If embarrassing to the Pentagon and the Justice Department, Teixeira may be offered a plea bargain of guilty in exchange for no trial of the evidence and a reduced jail sentence. The section of the Espionage Act which is the basis of Teixeira’s prosecution, 18 United States Code Section 793(e ), provides ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for  conviction  on each count. The 21-year old is facing the equivalent of a life sentence.  

It is not yet known whether Teixeira, who has been ordered to remain in prison without possibility of bail release, will appear in person in court or sign a waiver. His lawyers are also not saying what plea Teixeira will enter. (At a brief hearing on June 21, Teixeira appeared in federal court in Worcester and pleaded not guilty to reach of the charges. He was remanded in prison to appear next on August 9. )

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 20th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Until June 24 the combined air forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are conducting their largest operation against Russia in the 74-year history of the alliance. The plan has been to disguise F-16 fighter jets as if they are piloted by Ukrainians, and pretend they are  launched from Ukrainian territory. 

In response, Russian artillery, missile and fighter-bomber forces have been disabling and destroying Ukrainian airfields, and every Ukrainian aircraft being flown from them.  

Then on Friday, President Vladimir Putin dismissed the NATO pretence, warning that if an F-16 threatens to attack a Russian target,   it would be “burned”, and so would the launch airbase and supporting aircraft – fuel tankers, electronic countermeasures, command-and-control, and decoys –  no matter what NATO member-state flag they are  flying,  and on what territory they are  based.

“The F-16 will also burn, there is no doubt,” Putin said in St. Petersburg on June 16. “But if they are located at air bases outside Ukraine, and used in combat operations, we will have to look at how to hit and where to hit those means that are used in combat operations against us. This is a serious danger of NATO’s further involvement in this armed conflict.”  When the president and commander-in-chief announces “we will have to look at how to hit”, he means the General Staff have already assembled the operational intelligence and readied plans of attack with three minutes to launch; that is, against targets in Poland, Romania, Moldova, and possibly further west across the Czech and German borders. 

In the president’s phrase “those means that are used in combat operations against us”, Putin also intends to identify airborne targets, manned and unmanned, over the Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas.

Never before has NATO’s collective defence proviso Article Five been explicitly challenged by the Kremlin. In practice, by describing the agreement of the NATO members that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”, the NATO wording does no more than require each of the NATO members to take “forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary.” .

What is happening is that by aiming their display of NATO airpower at the Kremlin, US and German commanders in their Ramstein bunkers have provoked Putin to call their bluff: he is now aiming directly at the Poles, Romanians and Germans, telling them to “deem” whether war with Russia is “necessary”.

“Well, the Poles,” added Putin, “okay, they have their own goals, they sleep and see the return of Western Ukraine. And, apparently, they are gradually coming to this.”

In parallel,  the US has escalated to nuclear weapons by flying two US Air Force (USAF) B-1B bombers from the UK Fairford airbase, refuelling in Germany, transiting Poland and Romania, to a point in the Black Sea off the Crimean coast and the Sevastopol naval base, where  the aircraft transponders were turned off from public view.   

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by Editor - Saturday, June 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It’s religious to believe that a slight young man with a slingshot can defeat a heavily armed giant with a single stone.

No general, head of government, or national electorate can rationally calculate risking their fortunes and fates on such a disadvantageous ratio of force;  on a lucky shot;  and on an article of faith. Icons can motivate soldiers to ignore the odds of survival in a battle; they don’t win wars of attrition.

In the two hundred years since Greece freed itself of Turkish rule with Russian and British support, it’s to be expected that the Greeks would be obliged to count and counter the strengths of their enemies with the resources of their friends. Over the years this Greek calculation has required them to conceal, lie, cheat, fabricate, and steal from them all when their survival was at stake.

In retrospect of the 20^th century, that has happened more often to the Greeks than to most other Europeans. In the outcome for them of the Balkan Wars, 1912-1913; World War I; the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22; the Italian and German invasions of  World War II;  the Civil War of 1945-49; the military dictatorship of 1967-74, the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cypus from 1974; and the European bailout terms of 2015, the Greeks have suffered incomparable  losses.  Measuring by the European standard of destructiveness in war — civil war and invasion — only one country exceeds Russia (and possibly Serbia) in the frequency of violence, in the percentage losses of Gross Domestic Product, and  in casualties per head of population: this  is Greece. In the anti-Russian European alliance of today, no country has been as damaged by the violence and depredations of its own allies — the Turks, Italians, Germans, British, and Americans — as Greece.

That is,  until the US and NATO allies decided on war with Russia to be fought to the last Ukrainian and to the end of the Ukrainian state. For the time being, though, the money which the US,  the UK and NATO allies, and the International Monetary Fund have paid into the Kiev regime dwarfs the sums of reparations, compensation and aid paid to Greece.

Notwithstanding, in the current war none of these allies has concealed its role in the battlefield fight against Russia more clumsily than the Mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis (lead image, left) and his uncle, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (right).  No communist party in Europe has been as outspoken as the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in its verbal attacks on Russia.  No domestic oligarchs have put their capital to the aid of Russia as much as the Greek tanker fleet owners. No rocket forces commander has exchanged one anti-aircraft and missile defence system which works for another which does not as the Greek exchange of the Russian S-300 for the US Patriot.

These aren’t individual Greek faults or follies. They are contradictions which have political and economic reasons. But there  is a standard of deceit below which not even the Greeks in their historic and current predicament should fall. This is when the Greeks deceive and cheat each other for self-enrichment,  and for the benefit of the country’s enemies. The first of these is  corruption; the second is treason. When the two are combined in the running of the state – election votes, parliamentary majority, formation of government, allocation of budget, military pacts,  security service operations  – and when all of this is camouflaged by the courts and the media, then the country is committing suicide.

Is this the present fate of Greece? Listen to the discussion between Slobodan Despot, Alexander Mercouris, and John Helmer.

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by Editor - Saturday, June 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Black Sea is a small body of water by international sea standards.

It is so small that when the navies of the shore states go to war, the battles tend to be brief, hit-and-run affairs, like the skirmishes between the Romanians, Germans and Soviets in 1941-42, and between the Georgians and the Russians in August 2008. The Russians, with the bigger, better equipped navies,  tend to win. When they win, as they did over the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Sinope in 1853, the outside powers try to equalize by taking the anti-Russian side: it was the French and British in 1853; the Americans and the NATO allies now.

In the recent history of their direct encounters with the Russian vessels and their air support, the Americans  and British   have come off with what is known in maritime history as their tails between their legs.

The surface area of the Black Sea is 436,400 square kilometres.   By comparison, the Mediterranean, into which the Black Sea drains, is 2.5 million square kms, and there are several much larger seas than that. .

The Black Sea is also not the biggest of the seas on which Russia has a shore line and frontier. The Caspian Sea is 371,000 square kms; the Baltic Sea is 377,000 square kms; the Chukchi Sea,  595,000 square kms; the Barents Sea, 1.4 million square kms; the Sea of Okhotsk, 1.6 million square kms; and the Bering Sea, 2.4 square million kms. For the time being, the Black Sea is the only one of these seas in which one of the littoral territories, the Ukraine, has declared war on one of the littoral states, Russia.

In the year since the Special Military Operation began on February 24, 2022, Turkish figures count 52 ship losses altogether;   most of the Russian losses are Ukrainian claims which have not been verified. All of the Ukrainian losses on the Turkish list have occurred in port harbours or at a limit of 12 nautical miles (23 kms) offshore. The principal causes have been mines, shore-based artillery, missile, aircraft, and drone strikes.

In the past three weeks, the Kiev regime has declared war in the international waters of the Black Sea by launching drone boats to attack two Russian naval vessels operating to guard the gas pipelines which run on the seabed between Russia and Turkey. The pipelines are known as Blue Stream, operational in 2003, and Turkstream from 2020. On May 24, the Russian Navy’s  Ivan Khurs (lead image, left) was attacked by three Ukrainian surface drones; at the time the location was  140 kms northeast of the Bosphorus Strait, outside Turkish territorial waters, inside Turkey’s exclusive economic zone, but in international waters.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported the destruction of the attacking vessels without their reaching the Ivan Khurs, and the return of the vessel undamaged to its homeport of Sevastopol.  Its mission, the ministry said, had been “to ensure safe operation of the Turkstream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the exclusive economic zone of the Republic of Turkey and also [it] monitored the surface situation in the southwest part of the Black Sea to ensure the safety of navigation under the ‘grain deal.’”  

On June 11, six Ukrainian surface drones attacked the Russian Navy’s Priazovye (“Azov Sea”, lead image, right). All six were destroyed before they could strike. The reported location was about 300 kms southeast of Sevastopol; that is the northern limit of the Turkish exclusive economic zone, but still in international waters.  

The Ukrainian military have made no claim of responsibility.

The official Russian reporting of the incidents has treated them as Ukrainian terrorism. The method of the operations, and the vessels from which the drone boats were  launched, have not yet been disclosed, although the positional data appear to have been recorded by the overhead US Air Force FORTE11 operation,   and by overhead Russian surveillance aircraft, drones, and satellites, and by naval radars. The probability is also that real-time course targeting coordinates for the drones in their runs at the Ivan Khurs and the Priazovye were transmitted to the Ukrainians by the US Air Force (USAF).

The likelihood also is that the Ukrainian attackers used the shipping channel designated for the security of grain transportation under the Black Sea Grain Initiative agreements of July 2022. Compliance with these agreements is the responsibility of the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Ukrainian terrorism in violation of the agreements indicates the complicity of that UN official as the war has been extended by the Ukrainians and the USAF into international waters.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 14th, 2023
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