By Sergei Glazyev, translated and introduced by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday morning, February 25, Sergei Glazyev published the following analysis of US sanctions against the Russian economy and of the Russian options for defence and counter-attack.

Glazyev is a Russian state official with ministerial rank. He has served for many years as an economic policy adviser to President Vladimir Putin; since 2019 he is the minister for integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission, the bloc of former Soviet states coordinating customs, central banking, trade and fiscal management policies together.  

Glazyev, now 61, has also been the longest surviving force on the left of Russian policymaking since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and of Boris Yeltsin’s destruction of the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1993. He has been a consistent critic of the monetary policies of the Russian Central Bank; and of the oligarch system promoted by Anatoly Chubais, Alexei Kudrin, German Gref and their business allies in Moscow, and by the financial centres of New York and London.  For 25 years they have proved stronger inside the president’s circle than Glazyev; they have persuaded Putin to overrule him publicly, then ignore and sideline him. Until now.

Commencing with Putin’s February 21 speech, the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk  People’s Republics, and the commencement of the military campaign in the Ukraine, the management of the Russian economy has moved on to a war footing. In the interpretation of a leading European banker,  the escalation of US and European Union (EU) sanctions intends to  confiscate Central Bank assets and destroy all financial links between Russia and the west. He comments that nothing on this scale against a major world power has been attempted since President Franklin Roosevelt froze the foreign assets of Japan on July 26, 1941, and imposed an embargo on Japanese oil and gasoline imports six days later.  

The new sanctions commenced on February 22 in response to Russian recognition of Donbass independence, and the signing of a treaty of military and economic cooperation. The first  sanctions strike targeted two state banks; three sons of Russian state officials;  and state bonds to be  issued from Wednesday of this week.

The second-strike sanctions escalated on February 24 to “target the core infrastructure of the Russian financial system — including all of Russia’s largest financial institutions and the ability of state-owned and private entities to raise capital — and further bars Russia from the global financial system. The actions also target nearly 80 percent of all banking assets in Russia and will have a deep and long-lasting effect on the Russian economy and financial system.”  

In addition, the targets were expanded to include for the first time state-owned Alrosa, the diamond producer and international diamond market maker;  and Sovcomflot, the world’s largest energy tanker fleet operator.  At the same time, the US Treasury said it would not block Russian payments for “agricultural and medical commodities and the COVID-19 pandemic; overflight and emergency landings; energy.”

The third strike began overnight between February 26 and 27. The White House announced the disconnection from the SWIFT interbank payments system for “selected Russian banks” . Russian press reporting has speculated that Sberbank and VTB will be disconnected, along with the other banks targeted on February 24. It is not clear whether Alfa Bank, the leading commercial bank owned by Mikhail Fridman, will appear on the SWIFT disconnection list.   

The White House also announced the launch of “a multilateral Transatlantic task force to identify, hunt down, and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs – their yachts, their mansions, and any other ill-gotten gains that we can find and freeze under the law.”   

US and European Union officials are claiming that “restrictive measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank (CBR) from deploying its international reserves” amount to a freeze on the Central Bank’s US dollar and Euro denominated holdings. As of January 31, the CBR reported holding $469 billion in foreign exchange.   Of that aggregate, year-old CBR data suggest that 22% is in US dollars; 29% in Euros, and 6% in British pounds.  

London banking sources and a leading oil trade figure believe that if the third-strike sanctions halt US dollar and Euro payments for Russian oil, gas, coal, titanium, palladium, diamonds, and other commodity exports, along with servicing of interest and principal loans, then the Russian side will stop all debt payments. They will also stop all deliveries to the US and Europe.

The domestic Russian political implications are not less dramatic; they are potentially revolutionary, though not in the direction US figures like Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and William Burns have been calculating in public. Glazyev is one of the Russian revolutionaries they least want to see take power over the oligarchs now.  

For reporting on Glazyev’s responses to the first round of US sanctions in March 2014, read this,  For a longer archive on Glazyev back to 1993, click to open.  

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by Editor - Monday, February 28th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Baroness Heather Hallett (lead image, left), the second British state coroner responsible for investigating the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death on July 8, 2018, revealed in a London court on Friday that she has resigned after less than a year in the coroner’s post.

Sturgess died in Salisbury District Hospital four months after Sergei and Yulia Skripal were allegedly attacked by Russian military agents carrying the nerve agent Novichok; the Skripals recovered but have subsequently been held incommunicado.  

Hallett’s appointment was announced in March 2021, after the Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley was removed; he had lasted thirty-three months in charge. Hallett has already announced on the inquest website her conclusion before hearing the evidence. “The post mortem indicated the cause of her death was Novichok poisoning,” the website declares on its home page.    In fact and in British law, the post-mortem evidence has not done this.

Ridley was replaced by Hallett when he refused to allow testimony and evidence, and refused to rule that the cause of Sturgess’s death had come from Russia in the form of an assassination plot to poison Sergei Skripal, the Russian double or triple agent. Ridley also refused to release  the medical and pathological evidence; and concealed the cremation certificate he had himself signed on the cause of Sturgess’s death.

In a prepared script Hallett took into court and read out on February 25, she said “in late December last year, I accepted a request made by the Prime Minister to become the chair of the Covid Inquiry.  Because of the demands of that role, it was agreed that another judge would be appointed to chair the Sturgess Inquiry.”

The timing is inaccurate. Hallett’s appointment was announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a statement to parliament on December 15.    The negotiations for Hallett’s new post began days, possibly weeks before. No agreement was reached then, nor publicly announced, for Hallett to resign from the Sturgess proceeding, and for another judge to be appointed in her place. That came later.

By resigning, by concealing this for two months, and by falsifying her circumstances in court, Hallett appears to have been unwilling to take personal responsibility for directing her investigation to reach the outcome the British government requires. That is the conviction of the Russian military command, the Kremlin, and President Vladimir Putin himself for making the Novichok; for ordering a group of soldiers to use it in Salisbury in March 2018; and for leaving behind the bottle of Novichok which Sturgess allegedly used to perfume herself, with fatal effect.

In the 35-minute hearing Hallett chaired on Friday, the retired Court of Appeal judge also revealed that after more than two months the British Government has been unable to name another judge willing to replace Hallett and do what she was told to do. That’s to say, no judge has agreed to take the job, yet.

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by Editor - Sunday, February 27th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“It’s an attempt to tell an old truth in order to remind us what the new truth we now face will cost us if we open our eyes.”  

On Gorilla Radio yesterday we concluded on this line. The recording of the interview ended just before 5 in the Moscow morning on Thursday (Wednesday afternoon Pacific Standard Time). One hour later President Vladimir Putin announced the start of the military campaign to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine.  The narrative of what happened next, gathered from eyewitnesses, war front reporters, and open media sources by Boris Rozhin on the Colonel Cassad website’s Telegram platform, can be followed here.   

In advance of what we didn’t yet know, we already knew three things: the Stavka, not Putin alone, decides.   There was a change of decision between Monday evening’s speech by Putin  and Thursday morning’s speech;  this was not, however, a change of plans; they have been ready for some time, as everyone can see now. The black box defence would still be a surprise.

With the retrospect of hours, demilitarization of the Ukraine and denazification of the Galicians cannot be a surprise if you are Russian or Ukrainian. To them it is welcome. By contrast,  Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister of Canada, has repeated the lie which enriched her grandfather, her mother,  and the Galicians she represents: “We cannot allow Russia,” she said, “to destroy the rules based order Canadians died to defend in the Second World War…”   When the Galicians go on trial for their war crimes in the coming months – this is part of what denazification will mean — Canadian judicial observers will be invited to attend and investigate the evidence; the Dutch too.

In the interview we also discuss what it’s like to think like the Russians and Ukrainians do when the choice is – do now for yourselves, or wait to die later when they will kill you.

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by Editor - Saturday, February 26th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Not in his entire life has President Vladimir Putin made a speech like Monday’s Donbass address to the Russian people.   

Nor has he ever named the Americans to be Russia’s national enemy in such unequivocal Russian terms – American promises worthless, American intentions deadly, American speeches lies, American actions intimidation, extortion, blackmail.  

“So I want to ask”, Putin said: “why, why all this, for what? Okay, you don’t want to see us as a friend and ally, but why make us an enemy? There is only one answer: it’s not about our political regime, it’s not about anything else, they just don’t need such a large independent country as Russia. That’s the answer to all the questions. This is the source of traditional American policy towards Russia.”

“The pretext for another sanctions attack will always be found or simply fabricated, regardless of the situation in Ukraine. There is only one goal – to restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it as they did before, even without any formal pretext at all, just because we are and will never give up our sovereignty, national interests and our values.”

Unlike the most famous of English and American mobilization speeches against French, German and Confederate enemies – King Henry’s Agincourt, Winston Churchill’s Dunkirk, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speeches – Putin didn’t wave his arms or move significantly his head, neck, shoulders, or right hand.  Putin’s right hand is the operational one.

Watch and listen. The stillness of the body language, the pauses for breathing, the speech pitch, pace and modulation – these mean to all Russians: Do or die — now we do for ourselves or else the Americans will kill us.

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by Editor - Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For eighty years since the US invaded Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in 1943, American spies have targeted the Arabs for destruction, marking their leaders for assassination, stripping their people of the power to govern themselves.  The US government agents planned the sabotage of Arab oilfields and theft of their water. They bribed the Arabs to fight each other.  Convinced of American exceptionalism, lobbied by Israel, and bribed by US corporations, the OSS, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and every president since Roosevelt have imposed their protectorate over the Middle East.

They have compelled the Arabs to pay Washington or die.

They have rewritten the law of genocide so that the murderers have gotten away with their crimes. They have covered their tracks with a blitzkrieg of propaganda and censorship. This is rassenkampf – race war as the Germans once pursued it.  

Before the US Government went to war against the Russians in Europe, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, they practised in the Middle East on the Arabs. The methods and targeting are the same.  

“My complaint has been the CIA isn’t overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I’m getting old”, said the CIA agent who plotted the murder of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt as well as Arab leaders in Iraq, Syria,  and Lebanon. As each of those plots turned into disaster, as US casualties mounted, and the price of oil skyrocketed, the American spies profited with personal promotions and wealth in retirement.  “Nothing succeeds quite like failure,” concluded the Pentagon spy who paved the way to the fatal bombing of the US Marines in Beirut — the bloodiest episode in this history until the 9/11 attacks were followed by the defeats of the US wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan.   

This book reports from secret spy files discovered where they were buried in Washington.  It is the first book to report in English from unpublished interviews with the Arab leaders themselves, including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Saud al-Faisal, and George Habash.

The book manuscript has also survived the efforts of the CIA and the original New York publisher to bury it, just as the Arabs have been buried.  

Read here of graves, worms and epitaphs, and sad stories of the death of kings. Read on to understand what happens next.

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by Editor - Monday, February 21st, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a report published today by the Nordic Monitor, a leading source of independent analysis of Turkish political and security affairs by Abdullah Bozkurt in Stockholm, it is revealed that the Turkish drones supplied to the Ukrainian military forces now threatening the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, are duds when they face defenders armed with Russian electronic countermeasures and missile systems.  

Bozkurt’s analysis follows from a report by the Panel of Experts on Libya to the United Nations Security Council, published almost a year ago on March 8, 2021. The UN report was primarily concerned with violations of the Libyan arms embargo. In passing, the report noted that in the Libyan civil war, the “Turkey-supplied Bayraktar TB-2 unmanned combat aerial vehicles…were vulnerable to ground attack. When launched they were easily destroyed in the air by the Pantsir S-1 air defence system.”

A leading Cyprus military source says that Cypriot and Greek defence planners are well aware of the vulnerabilities of the Turkish drones. “The big news”, adds the source, “is that Turkey has been pushing military conflict – for example, in Karabakh and in the Donbass — to test the weapons they have for sale. They then tout joint ventures like the one with the Ukrainians for  promotion of weapons attacking Russian defences.   There has been a strategic decision for Turkey to sell cheap weapons to poor and corrupt Third World leaders – the regime in Kiev obviously qualifies – as western weapons are expensive and come with conditions. They are attempting ‘copy cat’ operations like those of Pakistan, Korea, Singapore. The Ukrainian venture will be great for them so long as the drones aren’t fired and tested against Russian defences.”

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by Editor - Monday, February 21st, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the Foreign Ministry’s new paper for the State Department, delivered on Thursday afternoon and then published on the Ministry website,   there is a restatement of the Russian proposals for security in Europe which the US refuses to address. There is also nothing new in the threat: “In the absence of the readiness of the American side to agree on firm, legally binding guarantees to ensure our security from the United States and its allies, Russia will be forced to respond, including through the implementation of military-technical measures.”

President Vladimir Putin said the same thing to the assembly of the Russian officer corps on December 21. “Is anyone unable to grasp this? This should be clear…I would like to emphasise again: we are not demanding any special exclusive terms for ourselves. Russia stands for equal and indivisible security in the whole of Eurasia. Naturally, as I have already noted, if our Western colleagues continue their obviously aggressive line, we will take appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures and will have a tough response to their unfriendly steps.”    

Putin’s point was repeated by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva on January 10, following his talks with his State Department counterpart, Wendy Sherman.  For more detail on those talks, read this.  

What is meant by “military-technical measures” is Russia’s black box defence. This is not the place – it will not be the place – to read what this will be. Anglo-American think-tankers are paid by their governments to guess what is inside the box, as is the new source for analysis of Russia in the Anglo-American media, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Three things are certain about what is inside the black box. The first is spelled out emphatically in yesterday’s Foreign Ministry paper: “There is no ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine, as the United States and its allies have been officially declaring since last autumn, and there are no plans for it.”  This rules out a land force invasion of Ukraine, as well as aerial bombing, missile and drone strikes launched from Russian territory.

The second sure thing about the black box defence is that it is black: it will be a surprise.

The third thing is, as Putin said last December, it will be “reciprocal”. This  means the Americans and their European allies are already using comparable measures in their attacks on Russia directly and in the Donbass. Reciprocal in this Russian vocabulary may mean comparable; it does not mean symmetrical along the Russian land border with the Ukraine; offshore, in the Black and Azov Seas; in the airspace above the Donbass or in the cyberspace .  

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by Editor - Thursday, February 17th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Sound familiar?

Without the direct knowledge, say-so, or approval of the ailing US President, a group of senior Washington officials plan in top secrecy to persuade Germany to recover all the eastern European territories which the German Army took in World War II – including Austria, the Czech Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor, and the western region of Ukraine known as Galicia. In return, the Germans should agree to resuming their war against Russia on US terms.

This was known in Washington as the M PROJECT. It was devised by a group of American co-religionists, with a common ethnic origin and a shared belief in the evil of everything Russia stood for, including their religion.

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by Editor - Sunday, February 13th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In Moscow John Bull hasn’t performed so feebly as this since the summer of 1918 when the British plans to kill Lenin in Moscow and lead an intervention army from Arkhangelsk collapsed.  The BBC has failed to report the plot.  It has missed the laugh lines.   

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by Editor - Friday, February 11th, 2022
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Introduced & translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The damage the European empires have done to Africa, especially the British, French,  and Italian, has always been a public accusation in Moscow,  and the policy of the Russian tsars, the Soviet Union, and President Vladimir Putin.

It was at the Potsdam conference of the wartime allies in July 1945 that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made a point of telling the US President Harry Truman, as well as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that the Soviet Union wanted to take the trusteeship of Libya under a United Nations protectorate, and ensure thereby the protection of the Libyans from the return of Italian colonial rule.  Churchill wanted the return of the Italians; Truman’s State Department wanted the same thing but not to appear publicly to betray Washington’s wartime promise that Libya – where the allied armies defeated both the Italian and German armies at immense cost in Libyan lives and property – would become independent.

Subsequent Soviet policy in Africa did not contest the US Air Force from turning Libya into a nuclear-armed base against the USSR. But on September 1, 1969, when Muammar al-Qaddafi removed the Libyan king, his government, and Wheelus Airbase, a Soviet naval force of seventy vessels, including the Moskva aircraft carrier, filled the sea between Crete and the Libyan coast, protecting Qaddafi from intervention by the US and the British.

Since the resumption of American, French and British intervention in Libya in 2011, and the murder of Qaddafi in October of that year, Putin has repeated in public his regret at the inaction of then-President Dmitry Medvedev to oppose both.  

What then followed in Libya, Putin has also repeated, led to disastrous wars in the African states to the south of Libya, especially Mali, and the flood of African refugees through Libya to Europe.

The Anglo-American and European propaganda organs are now accusing the Kremlin of intervening militarily in Mali and other African states through the operations of the Wagner Group. This issue came up directly during Putin’s six-hour talks with President Emmanuel Macron in the Kremlin on Monday.  It was openly discussed during the press conference which followed.  

The war in Mali was not identified as a significant talking point in either Putin’s or Macron’s prepared statements for the press.   

Instead, during the question-and-answer session, a French reporter asked Putin: “As for Mali, can you say that your government is not connected in any way with the mercenaries in Mali?” Putin replied: “First of all, regarding Mali. President Macron raised this issue many times, we discussed it with him, and President Macron is aware of our position on this matter. The Russian government, the Russian state have nothing to do with the companies that are working in Mali. As far as we know, the Malian leadership has no complaints about the commercial activities of these companies.”

“Following the logic that may be applied to NATO, the current member states and potential members, if Mali has opted to work with our companies, it has the right to do so. However, I would like to point out – I will talk about this with President Macron after this news conference – I would like to point out that the Russian state has nothing to do with this. It concerns the commercial interests of our companies, which coordinate their activities with the local authorities. We will take a closer look at this, but we have nothing to do with it. This is the first point.”

Macron did not comment.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
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