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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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There’s an old Russian adage about swallowing too much and trying to talk at the same time – if  you don’t want to die of gastroenteritis, keep your mouth shut.  This isn’t an option for  understanding the  past week of the war, and preparing for the next.

Bear in mind that, in the middle of the Ukrainian ground offensive and hours before the start of the largest NATO air operation since the alliance was created in April 1949,  the war in the Ukraine is having almost no impact on President Biden’s (lead image) job approval polls and thus on his re-election chances in November 2024.

By contrast, President Putin, who goes to election between January and March of 2024, has declared his new approach to what will happen between now and then.

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by Editor - Saturday, June 10th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The longest lasting of the false-flag operations conducted against Russia since the Special Military Operation started in February 2022 has been flying the flag of the United Nations (UN).

The chief flag-bearer has been the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese (lead image, left); he has manipulated, plotted, and lied his way through the Ukrainian hostage-taking at Azovstal, during the Battle of Mariupol;  the Ukrainian attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant; and Ukrainian attempts to break the ports blockade with what the UN has been calling its “Black Sea Grain Initiative”.   

Reinforcing Guterres in these schemes of deceit have been his spokesman, American and Frenchman Stéphane Dujarric (Rothschild),  Argentine Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA);  and the negotiator of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, British lawyer Martin Griffiths (lead image, right)  and https://twitter.com/. Griffiths came to his UN job from a Geneva organization funded by the anti-Russian governments of Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, the UK, Australia, Ireland, and Switzerland. It calls itself “The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue”.  

Guterres’s bluff was called a year ago, on April 26, at the long-table incident in Moscow when President Vladimir Putin told Guterres he was wrong on the facts, biased in his public statements, and acting in violation of his UN authority.  

“You can call it whatever name you like and have whatever bias in favour of those who did it, “ Putin told Guterres after getting him to confirm that the earphone to his interpreter was working. “But this was really an anti-constitutional coup. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the West preferred to ignore all this. After we recognised the independence of these states [Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics], they asked us to render them military aid because they were subjected to military actions, an armed aggression. In accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, Chapter VII, we were forced to do this by launching a special military operation…[About the Battle of Mariupol and the Azovstal hostages] Mr Secretary-General, you have been misled…The simplest thing for military personnel or members of the nationalist battalions is to release the civilians. It is a crime to keep civilians, if there are any there, as human shields.”  

Putin did not shake hands to greet Guterres; he placed him further away than any head of state had ever been seated in conversation at the Kremlin before; Guterres squirmed.  To CNN a day later in Kiev, Guterres lied about what had been said at the meeting.   Later, when asked in New York to say what and when he knew of the foreign combatants at Azovstal, and the use of civilian hostage shields in the battle, Guterres refused to answer.   

The Russian Foreign Ministry has been more explicit in its condemnation of Guterres than of any UN secretary-general before him. “Contrary to the requirements in the UN Charter,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman declared last July, “the [Guterres’ staff] Secretariat is not taking an equidistant position, as one would expect from a Secretariat of the most authoritative international organisation that is designed, among other things, to promote the settlement of disputes.”  

“I would like to remind our esteemed colleagues from the UN Secretariat”, according to Maria Zakharova at the ministry, “that their job is not to take sides in situations of dispute, but to help maintain peace and stability. This is what they are paid for and this is their mandate.”

On September 29, the Foreign Ministry announced: “The relevant functions do not give the Managing Director [Guterres] of the UN Secretariat the right to make biased political statements on behalf of the entire [UN] Organization. Nor is such a person authorized to interpret the norms of the Charter and documents of the General Assembly, including the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation between States in Accordance with the UN Charter… Obviously, A[ntonio] Guterres has not only exceeded his authority, but actually taken sides with the collective West, again resorting to a selective approach in the interpretation of the unfolding events.”  

“We consider unacceptable the fact that the UN Secretary-General has become an instrument of propaganda and pressure on Member States at a time when he should be guided by the UN Charter in its entirety.”

The defeat of the Ukrainian and NATO forces on the battlefield has gradually diminished the value to the US and NATO of the role of the UN Security Council and of Secretary-General Guterres. This has left Grossi exposed as playing the role of spokesman for Kiev when war operations caused the biggest radiation release so far into the atmosphere on May 13 as   Ukrainian army stocks of depleted uranium shells were blown up at Khmelnitsky.  

In the war over food stocks – the attempt to stop Russia exporting grain and crop fertilizers, and to use Ukrainian grain exports to recover Black Sea ports and to conceal attacks on Russian targets  – the role of Griffiths as the UN go-between has failed comprehensively, and for the same reason that Guterres and Grossi have failed. Griffiths told the UN on May 23 that the Ukraine is the victim of Russian attacks based on Kiev press releases. “The biggest challenge remains the impediments to reaching all areas in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia currently under the military control of the Russian Federation.”

Griffiths also claimed that “in recent weeks, we have engaged in intensive discussions with the parties to the Black Sea Initiative, to secure agreement on its extension and the improvements needed for it to operate effectively and predictably. This will continue over the coming days.”

In fact, Griffiths and UN officials cannot “engage” with the Russian side because they are no longer trusted. Griffiths’ claim that he and his staff have “continued to deliver a wide range of support with concrete results under the Memorandum of Understanding on the facilitation of Russian food and fertilizer exports” is false.

The Russian response is that Grossi and Griffiths have been following “illegal instructions to his subordinates” from Guterres.  

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by Editor - Monday, June 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a month it will be three hundred and fourteen years precisely since the Swedes lost their king, their generals, their soldiers, and their empire when Tsar Peter the Great and the Russian army defeated them at the Battle of Poltava (lead image). That battle of July 8, 1709, is the greatest disaster in Swedish military history; it is the bitterest grudge they hold against Russia, still.   

The Swedes were obliged to accept their inferiority and become a minor power in Europe. Their  strategic calculation ever since has been to conserve their resources by keeping to the winning side in Europe, while hoping to revenge themselves on the Kremlin. At Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, they still hope if,  with Swedish money, arms, and men, the regime in Kiev can manage it.

Over the past week the Swedish Air Force has taken its Saab-made JAS39 Gripen  fighter-bombers to the air, alongside other NATO forces and the USS Gerald Ford in what they are calling Operation Arctic Challenge 23. At the same time, the Swedish Defense Minister Pål  Jonsson, has admitted that he is discussing with Kiev supplying the Gripen for attacking Russian forces over the Ukrainian battlefield. “Yesterday [February 14], I had the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Reznikov….We are significantly increasing our support for Ukraine”.  “President Zelensky also asked for it.”

Jonsson didn’t admit that the Swedes are discussing with the US, NATO, and the Czech Republic a form of disguising the battlefield deployment of the Gripen through third countries and through NATO’s Air Defender 23 exercise, which begins on June 12.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The last time the Norwegians whipped themselves into a frenzy of warmaking race hatred, their minister president was Vidkun Quisling (lead image, left).  

An exceptionally intelligent young military officer, he became the Norwegian General Staff’s expert on Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution. He then was posted to the Norwegian Embassy in St Petersburg early in 1918, returning to Oslo when the embassy was suspended  after the revolution. He returned to Kharkov in 1922 where he married a Russian, and then the following year, he married another local woman, an ethnic Ukrainian. He was in Moscow for three years, 1926-28, first engaged in trading timber and buying Russian antiques, then representing the British Embassy which had been closed after the revolution and British troops invaded.

When he launched his political career at home, Quisling had become a fascist and racist, and his book of 1930, Russland og vi (“Russia and Ourselves”)  a manifesto of Norwegian identity in combat against Bolshevism, revolution, and the Russian race. He met Adolf Hitler (right) many times, starting in mid-1939. “An unspeakable enemy is threatening our civilization”, Quisling’s book began. “This enemy is Bolshevism, the master of Russia and the champion of the World Revolution.” At the time, Norway’s military and economic survival, Quisling believed, depended on the British Empire, as he called it. “The Russian question is an issue between Bolshevism and the Teutonic nations, especially Great Britain, the natural upholder of all that is in opposition to and threatened by Bolshevism.” Breaking up the old Russian Empire’s states and the Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine, Quisling wrote, “might prove a useful means for attaining certain ends, but it might also lead to a reaction which would be destructive to those who had planned it. Charles XII and Germany had that experience in the Ukraine, though this does not necessarily prove much as regards the present and the future. For the rest, it must be remembered that the Ukraine is a country of the same size as Germany, with a population of over 30 millions, possessing great natural wealth, and every qualification for becoming an independent State.”

Quisling’s policy and his party, Nasjonal Samling (NS, “National Gathering”),  were political failures until the German Army invaded and occupied Norway in 1940. Quisling and his NS party ministers were installed in power in Oslo alongside a German reichskommissar reporting to Berlin,   in February 1942. They held office until the Germans left early in 1945. Quisling was arrested in May of that year; put on trial for embezzlement, murder,  and treason; convicted in September; and executed in October.

The first time Quisling’s name was used in English to mean treachery, betrayal, and treason was in an editorial of The Times of London in April 1940. “Quislings everywhere” ran the headline.  In New York, Time magazine followed by turning the name into the verb quisle, and the noun quislers.  Quisling has stuck.

“I want to let history reach its own verdict,” Quisling said from prison after his arrest. “Believe me, in ten years’ time I will have become another Saint Olav.”

More than ninety years have elapsed since Quisling wrote this: “The most effective remedy for Bolshevism and Bolshevist-Russian plots and intrigues will be found in a closer cultural, economic and political co-operation between those peoples which are the main supporters of Western civilization, and which can be described as Nordic in the widest sense of the term. Where are these peoples? They are in the Scandinavian countries, in Holland and Flanders, the British Empire, Germany, the United States of America, to a considerable extent in France, and largely intermingled with the people of other countries where the Nordic race, however, does not prevail to the same extent. A Northern Coalition of these nations, beginning with Scandinavia and Great Britain—and with the inclusion of Finland and Holland—which might attract Germany next, and possibly the British Dominions and America later on would render innocuous any Bolshevist combination, and would within a measurable distance of time ensure European peace and civilization.”

A firing squad put Quisling into the grave on October 24, 1945. With the new Norwegian doctrine of Teutonic-Nordic war, that is to say, NATO war against Russia, Quisling has jumped out of his grave, and his doctrine has become Norwegian state policy.

Observers record that hatred of Russians and Russian culture is more intensely expressed and pervasive in Oslo than in any other west European capital. Once again, it is righteous in Norway to wage war against Russia for the advancement of the Teutonic-Nordic race and western civilization. To quisle, in short.

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by Editor - Thursday, June 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Existentially speaking — which means whether to live and let live, to do or die — how far from a mortal enemy is far enough? In between the one and the other outcome, is there anything but a no man’s land?  

Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed” – was a Roman strategic aim 2,200 years ago. It was regularly repeated in his public speeches by Marcus Porcius Cato in his advocacy of putting an end to the Punic Wars by destroying the Carthaginian adversary entirely, not just militarily, so that it could never rise again to challenge Roman power. The opposition slogan was Carthago servanda est – “Carthage must be saved”. Its author, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, meant don’t rule by force if it can be avoided;  instead conserve lives, resources, power.  

Cato was a politician; Corculum was a soldier. The political strategy of doing what you can because you can, and as a warning to everyone else, won out; Cato is remembered even now; Corculum is forgotten.  This is not because imperial history repeats itself, but because the history is always written by people aiming to stay on the winning side: they don’t know any better until the empire has been lost and their retainers with it.

In the evolution of the Russian war aims, former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Security Council, stood up for the Cato line last week. “Ukraine will disappear”, he declared. “Now it’s time to say how Ukraine will disappear, and also what will then be the risk of a resumption of the war in Europe and in the rest of the world.” Medvedev also left open the Corculum option after the Cato option in his last line. “We may be temporarily satisfied with the second option, but we need a third one.”

Because Russia is the only functioning democracy on the two sides of this war, where military tactics and war aims are openly argued in parliament and the media, the debate between the Cato delenda war aim, and the Corculum servanda war aim is an active one. Sworn to destroy President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and economy, the US, European and western allies misinterpret this debate to be vacillation and vulnerability. Dialectically speaking, this encourages the Cato line faction in Moscow at the expense of the Corculum line faction.  In this way the US and NATO axis provokes its own defeat.  

This process has taken the war well beyond the 300-kilometre range of some of the US, French or British weapons which have been deployed and fired to date. The debate over the 300-km westward defence line was winding up in Russia, not beginning, when winter started  last year.   

Medvedev made this official last week, following the intensification of artillery, rocket, and drone attacks on Russian cities, including Moscow. This week the governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, went further. Then yesterday President Putin (lead image, left) tried to pull Gladkov and Medvedev back in line —  that’s the Corculum line, not the Cato line.

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by Editor - Tuesday, May 30th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The man in the frame is General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

There are no insignia on his jacket, zipped tight to his chin. His torso and legs are concealed beneath the desk which also accommodates a computer screen without keyboard or mouse; and a pen held between the general’s right thumb and index finger, upside down and useless. Patriotic slogans have been pasted to the wall. A wall socket accommodates a thick communications cable routed along the base of the wall, but not visibly connected to the two telephones. There are ten unopened water bottles on display, six plastic cups. A single piece of paper on the desk reveals no date. The general is able to say a dozen scripted words and raise his left hand.

He is not dead from the Russian missile attack which had caused his disappearance until this video clip was published on Thursday evening to dispel what the Ukrainian introducer called the mystery and the Russian propaganda of  Zaluzhny’s death. The clip proves the opposite of this  intention. The general is visibly unwell and is no longer capable of commanding the Ukrainian forces.

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by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“He was not a nihilist for nothing!”

This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian literature.

Appearing to come out of the stream of consciousness of one of story’s characters, the line is also an irony of Turgenev’s — and if you understand that he meant nihilist as a synonym of Russian, it is a warning of great philosophical force for right now. Right now is a synonym for June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded to destroy the Russians; and for June 24, 1812, when Napoleon tried the same. Those two names can’t be synonyms for Biden because the German and the Frenchman weren’t demented or led by psychopaths.

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by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This is a primer on the way the wind has been blowing since the Ukrainian ammunition  stockpile was blown up at Khmelnitsky in the early hours of May 13.

Radiation measurements in the western Ukrainian city appear to have risen sharply on May 13 and 14, indicating that British-supplied depleted uranium shells for anti-tank warfare had been detonated. The radiation-level spiking caused by the release of the depleted uranium (DU) has been denied by Ukrainian officials.  

US media reported on May 15 that “while not all of the facts and information about the multiple strikes on Western regions of Ukraine have been fully established, there are several elements to the viral conspiracy narrative that are provably false, misleading or lack evidence.”  “While Newsweek could not rule out the possibility that the ‘depleted uranium’ shells provided by the U.K. had been stored there, past reports about the nature of these munitions put a big question mark over that claim.”

Newsweek endorsed Ukrainian government agency claims. “Energoatom, the National Nuclear Power Company of Ukraine, said in its official Telegram channel that ‘the radiation level at the industrial site [in Khmelnitsky] and in the surrounding regions is at a level corresponding to the normal operation of power units and does not exceed natural background values.’”

A statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeated the Ukrainian government claim without publishing independent radiation measurements of its own. The IAEA was reported by Newsweek as having “poured cold water over the claims. “The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency today that there have been no measurements of elevated levels of gamma radiation in the country’s western regions in recent days,” a representative of the international body told Newsweek in an email.”  

Social media from the region have indicated a rapid exodus of the population in the vicinity of the blast.  Anti-radiation measures have been introduced for the residents of the Ternopol region, which neighbours Khmelnitsky to the west.  

The wind has been blowing northwest into Poland since, and raining. The Polish state Atomic Energy Agency (PAA) has been reporting radiation-level spiking since May 15. The highest measurements have been reported at Lublin and Krakow in the south, and then Gydnia, a port on Poland’s north coast.

On May 19 in Moscow, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council, said the “elimination [of the Khmelnitsky stockpile] has caused a radioactive cloud that is now moving towards Western Europe. An increase in radiation levels has already been registered in Poland.”   Patrushev was repeating what the PAA had already confirmed.

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by Editor - Monday, May 22nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a grave risk that in three weeks’ time US and NATO forces will attempt direct combat against Russia.

The operational plan is to strike from Romanian airspace in the south and the Baltic states in the north, in camouflage of the NATO exercise called “Air Defender 23”,  and under cover of US F-16 fighter aircraft purportedly operated by Ukrainian pilots but fuelled, directed, and guarded by more than two hundred US and NATO aircraft, including the most advanced US air war fighter, the F-35.  

“This [is] the largest deployment exercise since the foundation of NATO”, according to the cover story published by NATO headquarters. “   Commanded at US bases in Germany, ostensibly led by German officers, a Bundeswehr “fact sheet” claims “100 [US] Air National Guard aircraft from 35 different states will make the leap across the Atlantic to participate in Air Defender 2023. In addition to the world’s most modern jets, the F35, more than 20 different types of aircraft and Airmen from 24 nations will practice air warfare operations together over Germany, but also over eastern Europe on the NATO border. Among them Eurofighter, F18, F16, A10, [Saab] Gripen jets.”  

Including the Ukrainian regime in Kiev as one of “our partners in East and South-Eastern Europe”, the German military announcement says “we want to promote collective defense of common values (freedom, democracy, prosperity) – attack on one NATO nation is an attack on responsiveness of airpower – Allied air forces are first responders.”

Camouflaging US direction of the combined NATO attack operations from the Ramstein base in Germany, headquarters of the allied air command in Europe, are two parallel operations.  “Two NATO exercises, RAMSTEIN DUST for NATOs Deployable Air Command and Control capability, the DARS,  and RAMSTEIN GUARD for Electronic Warfare are linked into our exercise.”     

In design since the start of the Russian Special Military Operation in February 2022, this plan of US and NATO air operations against Russia follows the defeat of the Ukrainian ground forces at Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and the strategic defeat of the US Patriot missile system at Kiev by the Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile on May 16.

The use of NATO exercises to conceal active attacks on Russian targets was first demonstrated last September when the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up following the BALTOPS naval exercise.  More recently, on May 13 a US-directed ambush of Russian aircraft was rehearsed  when an Su-34 fighter-bomber, an SU-35 air-defence escort, and two Mi8 helicopters were hit simultaneously and downed in Russian airspace,  over Bryansk region.  

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by Editor - Saturday, May 20th, 2023
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