By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week on October 19 the US Navy announced that “General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla [lead image, lower right] , commander of CENTCOM, conducted a visit aboard the USS West Virginia [top], a U.S. Navy Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine at an undisclosed location at sea in international waters in the Arabian Sea. Kurilla was joined on the USS West Virginia by Vice Admiral Brad Cooper [lower left], commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and NAVCENT.”   

The Fifth Fleet and the Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) are headquartered at Bahrain on the Persian Gulf.  From Bahrain down the Gulf to the Masirah Island airbase, off Oman, is a flight distance of 1,047 kilometres. From Masirah to the West Virginia and its escort was within helicopter flight range.

Two days later,  the Pentagon reported that “on October 21, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke by phone with Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu. Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine.”  They spoke again on October 23, according to Austin’s spokesman, because Shoigu had “requested a follow up call.”  

Less than 24 hours elapsed before Austin telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Alexei Reznikov,  to “reiterate[d] that the United States rejects the public and false allegations by Russia about Ukraine and any attempt to use them as a pretext for further Russian escalation of its unlawful and unjustified war against Ukraine.”  

The same day, in the Moscow evening,  the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a communiqué confirming that “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley spoke with Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov today by phone. The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep the lines of communication open. In accordance with past practice, the specific details of their conversation will be kept private.” RIA, the Russian state news agency,  reported that in their conversation the generals “discussed the possibility raised by Moscow that Ukraine might use a ‘dirty bomb’.”  

“The call took place shortly after a similar conversation between Gerasimov and his British counterpart.”

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British chief of staff, announced that Gerasimov had requested their conversation. According to Radakin,  he had “rejected Russia’s allegations that Ukraine is planning actions to escalate the conflict, and he restated the UK’s enduring support for Ukraine. The military leaders both agreed on the importance of maintaining open channels of communication between the UK and Russia to manage the risk of miscalculation and to facilitate de-escalation. The conversation followed the Defence Secretary’s call with his Russian counterpart yesterday and a call between the Foreign Ministers of France, the UK, and the USA last night.”  

That preceding call of foreign ministers, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the US, produced a joint statement of “committ[ment]  to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory for as long as it takes. Earlier today, the defense ministers of each of our countries spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu at his request. Our countries made clear that we all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory. The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation. We further reject any pretext for escalation by Russia.”   

Blinken then telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Dmitry Kuleba, to repeat both parts of the message – that the Ukraine should not escalate to using a nuclear weapon, and that Russia should do likewise.  

In case there was hardness of hearing or weakness of command and control in Kiev, or ambiguity between what Reznikov and Kuleba thought they were hearing from Washington and London, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had met Austin at the Pentagon on October 18.  They then telephoned to talk again on Sunday, when they “reaffirm[ed] the U.S.-UK defense relationship and the importance of transatlantic cooperation. Their conversation today was a continuation of their discussion at the Pentagon last week, which covered a wide range of shared defense and security priorities, including Ukraine.”  

Austin telephoned Kiev again yesterday to repeat to Reznikov that he should make sure the allegation of a Ukrainian nuclear weapon escalation was “false”;  and that the allies had given Moscow this assurance in exchange for Moscow’s undertaking against “further escalation” – read Russian nuclear response.    

At the same time yesterday, Vzglyad, the Moscow security publication, published its assessment of the escalating nuclear threat to Russia from the US, as the Kremlin, Defence Ministry, General Staff and the Stavka see it now.  A translation into English follows.

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the history of the wars in Europe, and the wars in Asia, there has never been a combination like the present one.

When the Special Military Operation began on February 24, the Russian forces at the western border were counted by the western media at about 190,000; roughly half then crossed the frontier into the Ukraine. They were opposed by a Ukrainian force of about 200,000 entrenched and fortified east of the Dnieper River.  Never has an offensive force fought against a defensive force with a ratio of one to one or less; the customary US Army rule of thumb is not less than three to one, and with firepower added to the ratio, preferably five to one.  

The line of contact between the two armies, the Ukrainian and Russian, has been differently estimated from the 672-kilometre distance of the Kharkov-Odessa road, to about 1,000 kms to take account of the salients in and out of the Donetsk and Lugansk territories. Compare the length of this line to the trenches of the Allied and German armies between 1914 and 1918 of about 760 kms; the Maginot Line built by the French against the Germans in the 1930s of 448 kms; the Berlin Wall of 1961 of 140 kms; or Israel’s West Bank Barrier, fortified between 2002 and 2005, of 708 kms. Never has so long a line as the Novorussian one been manned by so few.

Not since the US imposed asset confiscations, export bans, and the oil and fuel embargo on Japan between 1937 and 1941, and the trade blockade against Germany from 1939, has US and allied economic warfare against a target country reached the present scale against Russia.

And never before has Russia proved strong enough militarily and economically to bypass, neutralize, overcome, or defeat all three.

At the same time, not since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke of 1919 has a US president been as incapacitated medically as Joseph Biden. Never before have the European allies been as politically incapacitated as the British, French, and Germans all at the same time.

This combination of strength and weakness has spilled the war for Europe into a war of the world. As Hrvoye Moric asks the questions, listen to the new TNT Radio podcast discussing the why, the wherefore, and what happens next.

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by Editor - Sunday, October 23rd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In war, force and money do the talking on the ground. Not talk in the air.

On the electric battlefield in the Ukraine, the targeting of Russian attacks is being calculated to cut the command and control links between the Galician capitals of Lvov and Kiev west of the Dnieper River and the Russian east, according to fresh analyses prepared by a North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition.  

In the first round this month, he says, the missile raids were a “reconnaissance in force. The Russians were experimenting with, and proving, their operational concepts; for instance, how well Iranian drones perform in concert with their other weapons options and tactics. They were  testing NATO counter- measures as well.”

For the time being, this is allowing the wealthy quarters of both cities to enjoy plentiful electricity; even rising house prices according to Kiev realtors in interviews to European media.  They are the sources for western media reporting of how normal and resilient the two cities are.

However, the BBC is now reporting President Vladimir Zelensky as saying  “that 30% of Ukraine’s power stations had been destroyed in the past eight days. Parts of the capital Kyiv have no power and water after new strikes on Tuesday.” The state propaganda organ added: “UK defence intelligence said it was highly likely that Russia had become increasingly willing to strike civilian infrastructure, in addition to military targets, since its setbacks on the battlefield.”

The North American military source has a different assessment. “The power losses in those cities have been targeted to pit those without the money or means for relief against those who have it. The Russian General Staff goal, in my estimation, is not to break the Ukrainian population’s will to fight, or their western backers’ stream of cash and arms. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. The Russians are even allowing the electric trains to keep moving between Lvov and Poland carrying western reporters, rotating NATO staffs, and military resupplies.  It’s to concentrate the new US arms supplies where they can be attacked more cost-effectively in the east; to prevent Zelensky’s men from communicating with their units and with the civilians across the Dnieper, in Kharkov and Odessa; and to allow those who want to leave to head for Poland and Germany. The Russian general who defeated Napoleon once called that his ‘Golden Bridge’ strategy.”  

He is referring to Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov (lead image, left). The deadline  in the Russian calculation is November 15, when President Joseph Biden (centre) will meet President Vladimir Putin (right)  at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, along with a Ukrainian delegation headed by Zelensky. “A quick glance at Ukrainian rail ticket sites shows that the trains are still running between Kiev and Lvov. I don’t believe this is an accident, nor a failure, of the Russian side. With the escalation this week, I believe we are in the attrition phase of the Electric War which coincides with the Ukrainian electricity market data releases, and the approaching Indonesia meeting.”

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 18th, 2022
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