By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The title of an op-ed piece by a Moscow academic, published this week in Vzglyad, bellwether of Russian security analysts, requires reading between the lines. Every Russian knows how to do this since the tsar’s chancellery posted bulletins outside the Winter Palace on how well the Russian Navy was doing in battles against the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904.

Neither the gap nor the remedy has been the point of any communiqué issued from the regular meetings of the Kremlin Security Council,  nor has it been discussed publicly in the state media, including the Valdai Club.

The Vzglyad headline refers to the one international conflict on which President Vladimir Putin has said so little since the start of his term, and done so much – this is Israel’s war against Palestine.

The gap was made visible once by the General Staff; that was in September 2018 after the Israel Air Force caused the shoot-down in Syria of a Russian Ilyushin-20M electronic reconnaissance aircraft (lead image),  and the killing of all fifteen crewmen on board. At that time the Russian military expressed a loss of confidence which had not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military aid to Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, dismissing Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.   

Read the first report of the evidence in the Il-20 case on September 18, 2018,    and the second report on September 24, 2018.  The third report two months later revealed what happened after Putin had what the Kremlin spokesman called “a short talk” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Paris on November 11, 2018. The next day, the Security Council notice of November 12 reported Putin had “informed the permanent members of the Security Council about several of his brief meetings on the sidelines of the events in Paris.”  

Four and a half years have elapsed since then. The Vzglyad headline of April 17 means there is a policy, and there is pressing reason of state to change it now. Inside the text, the point is expressed by its author more tentatively. “Perhaps it’s time to change the approach somewhat? After all, it no longer fully corresponds to both the changed regional situation and Russian national interests.”

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by Editor - Tuesday, April 18th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There’s one way of winning a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible;  and another way of losing a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible.

The first way is to stock up on champagne, as they are doing in Moscow.

The second way is Washington’s: that’s to send armoured units, combat uniformed  police,  and media reporters in helicopters to a village to capture a boy in his night shorts. You already know all there is to see   – if not to know — about the second. Here is what to know in addition.  

In Moscow, the news just in, according to Tass,  is that “in the first quarter of 2023, the production of champagne in Russia increased by 14.4% to 2.5 million decalitres relative to the indicator of 2022”. Also, “the government did not support the idea of posting a warning on every bottle, on ‘Alcohol is your enemy!’”

In this war, Russians know exactly who and what the main enemy is,  as they keep telling the domestic pollsters. It’s the US.  

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by Editor - Sunday, April 16th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The sound out of Washington from the Pentagon Papers is what is known in the medical profession as a death rattle. This is what happens when an emperor makes a lethal or suicidal mistake; dies at the hands of his  praetorian guard;  and is replaced by the military candidate.

In ancient Rome   the process started with the murder of the Emperor Caligula (lead image, left) and his replacement by Claudius from  41 to 54 AD. As Claudius predicted, it would get worse.  From 238 AD there were fourteen “barracks emperors” in just thirty-three years. After that there were ghost emperors – the real power was in the Roman army. But the power of the army was shrinking smaller and smaller geographically as it ran out of arms to extract tribute and enforce its tax-paying protectorate until ultimately it could not protect itself.  

The history means the empire doesn’t die quite as quickly as the emperor.

What the Pentagon Papers mean is that that the US is heading for military rule. An incumbent or a  candidate without the endorsement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cannot win or keep his power. This form of military rule is not so much to save the empire from the Russians in Europe and the Chinese in Asia – the US Army, Navy and Air Force are already losing both of those wars. They have leaked their warnings to a hapless boy at an airbase on Cape Cod in order to cut their losses and save themselves to fight another day.

Accordingly, the Pentagon Papers signal the start of their fight to the end of the caligulists at the State Department like Antony Blinken (right) and Victoria Nuland (centre), and the so-called neocon (horse for president)  faction in the Democratic Party.

This also means that the alternative US military voices whom you see on Youtube – Colonel Douglas McGregor, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, Major Scott Ritter and also CIA veterans like Philip Giraldi, Larry Johnson, and Ray McGovern – they too are trying to save the US empire. They aren’t pro-Russian or pro-Chinese. They don’t want to see the US forces defeated so comprehensively that none of the allies will agree to pay the bill to be protected.

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by Editor - Saturday, April 15th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Marcus Kolga,  author of a new Canadian report claiming “Russian influence operations” threaten the minds of Canadian voters and “digitally illiterate” Canadian children has a Nazi grandfather problem just like Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland.

Freeland’s grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak from Lvov, Ukraine, was a paid spy and propagandist of the German Army and occupation authority in Poland and Ukraine during World War II; that is according to Polish police, US Army, Canadian and Ukrainian records. They report he stole an apartment, a printing press, antiques, and a car from Jews whose murder in a nearby concentration camp Chomiak promoted in his publications. He also supported the liquidation of Russians and Poles.    

Kolga’s grandfather, Eduard Kolga, born in Estonia, was a volunteer with anti-Soviet, pro-German Estonians in the Forest Brothers movement (Metsavennad) which fought with the Germans against  Soviet forces during World War II and in the years following the defeat of the Wehrmacht and of Germany.    Eduard Kolga spent part of the war in a Russian prison camp from which he claims to have escaped in 1942 and to have returned to Estonia. What he did in collaboration with the Germans for the two years remaining before they were forced out by the Russians, and what he then did in Estonia until 1951, remain undisclosed by his grandson Marcus, who has made a documentary film about him.

Eduard Kolga arrived with his wife and two sons in Halifax, Canada, in 1951; his grandson Marcus was born in Toronto in 1973.  In the latter’s Wikipedia profile he identifies Canada as a geographic location for him to conduct Estonian business, and himself as “an Estonian journalist and political scientist in Canada.”

Both grandfather and grandson have played active roles in the Estonian diaspora in Canada. Both have represented the same virulent Russia hatred as Chomiak and Freeland have in the Ukrainian diaspora. Chomiak and Freeland and the two Kolgas have advocated war against Russia as Canadian policy for the benefit of their countrymen in the Ukraine and Estonia, and for the advancement of themselves in Canada. Both Freeland and Kolga are named on the Russian Foreign Ministry list of Canadians banned from entering Russia.

“I had two death sentences issued against me by the Soviets because I fought with the Forest Brothers (Metsavennad), a partisan group battling against the Soviet invaders,” Kolga senior acknowledged in his grandson’s 2005 documentary.  What he did as an anti-Russian partisan after the Wehrmacht retreated from the Red Army,   he has not acknowledged publicly, and his grandson has not reported.

Although Marcus “doesn’t speak Estonian properly”, according to a fellow Estonian,   he has made  a career as a leader of the Central Council of Estonians in Canada,   and in Canadian government-financed research as an expert on Russia.

But Kolga isn’t an expert on Russia. What Kolga says is that he is paid by Canadian think tanks with funding from Canadian, US, and other government agencies to target Russia for information warfare — his war against theirs.  

“In 2007”, he recently wrote, “Russia tested its new information and cyber capabilities by targeting Estonia… Since then the Russian government and its proxies have meddled in over a dozen elections worldwide…including the 2016 US presidential election. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian information operations amplified and promoted vaccine hesitancy and anti-lockdown narratives in Canada… There is growing that Russia ramped up its information operations as it ordered military buildup along its western border… in the latter half of 2012.”

Kolga is an information warfare soldier against Russia; a mercenary because he is paid to fight. Financing him are the “research partners” he lists on his website, Disinfowatch.org, led by the US Embassy in Ottawa;  the State Department’s Global Engagement Center;  a NATO agency in Riga, Latvia; the European Union;  and state-funded think tanks in Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Sweden, which report in turn their funding by US, Estonian, British,  and other NATO government agencies.

Follow the fighter to his paymaster, and you will understand what the fight is for. Follow the fighter to his grandfather, and you will understand this is a blood feud.

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In observing cat-and-mouse games, the rule of thumb is — if observers of the war in the Ukraine have a thumb — to recognise the difference between the cat and the mouse.

On the Ukrainian battlefield, it is now the Russian cat who is waiting for the US, NATO and Ukrainian mouse to break out of his hole and make his run. When he does, the mouse is going to get the surprise of his life. That last noun is the wrong one.

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by Editor - Sunday, April 9th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was former British prime minister Harold Wilson who said in answer to a question from reporters that a week is a long time in politics. He couldn’t remember in what week he said it. A century earlier, when reporters were quicker witted than they are now, another British politician had said: “In politics, there is no use in looking beyond the next fortnight.”  

The fabrication for publication of US military intelligence documents on the timing and capabilities of a Ukrainian army offensive has taken five weeks for reporters to realise its political impact in Washington and Kiev. But since the documents were intended to fool reporters, the political impact in Moscow has been zero.

Much more important – and much less reported – is the impact of the municipal and Senate elections in The Netherlands three weeks ago which were won by a nationwide protest movement against anti-farm policies called the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging, BBB). This surprise victory is turning the BBB into political party with a much larger agenda.

The March 15 election result is the first in Europe to defeat an incumbent prime minister (Mark Rutte, lead image, left) since the Russian special military operation began on February 24, and the Slovenian parliamentary election evicted the pro-Ukrainian prime minister on April 24.  

The Dutch vote result is also the first national defeat in Europe of a hot-war, Russia-hatred Green party; the first time a street protest movement has been successfully turned into  parliamentary power, following the collapse of the Gilets Jaunes movement in France in 2020; and the first time a surprise election outcome in a NATO warfighting state has not (repeat not) been blamed in the mainstream media on Russian interference.

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by Editor - Saturday, April 8th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Everyone who has ever heard rice go snap, crackle, and pop! knows that eating the grain is good for your energy.

At the front, Russian soldiers are eating more rice, on per capita average, than any other soldier in Europe, twice as much as the Ukrainian troops. And the rice the Russians eat is Russian grown; in fact, Russia is a net exporter of rice to bigger rice-eaters in Turkey, Mongolia, Jordan, and Belarus.

Russians don’t eat their rice like the really big consumers of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Vietnam. They don’t cook it into risotto, noodles, paella, biryani, nasi goreng, pudding, or krispies.  Instead, it is served up as kasha for breakfast or plov for dinner.

Because rice is a traditional part of the Russian cuisine and diet, rice growing is an important agricultural business, especially in the Krasnodar region, along the Black Sea coast, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the annual harvest of over one million metric tonnes, according to the Russian Rice Union and reports from the US Department of Agriculture.  

Naturally, growing consumer appetite will turn into growing demand for the agricultural land required for cultivation of the rice crop. Water is the next most valuable input to rice growing; if water is in short supply, no amount of special seed breeding, fertiliser, manual and machine labour on the land can lift both yields per hectare and total production for milling.

When the irrigation of Krasnodar’s rice paddies stopped in April 2022, following the collapse of the Fedorovsky hydroelectric dam,   production fell sharply, and so did exports. Imports increased to compensate. The rice harvest had been growing from 1.099 million tonnes in 2019 to 1.142 mt in 2020, 1.076 mt in 2020, and 1.099 mt in 2021. But drought last year cut the harvest to 797,600 mt – a loss of 27%.  To hold down the price, keep up supply, and protect domestic consumers, the government banned rice exports starting in July of 2022. This restriction has been extended until at least July of this year.  

The dam failure was the result of long delayed state spending on repairs and upgrades. The effect on rice growers of the ensuing drought has been to the advantage of the largest, best capitalised farms in the region. The rice oligarchs, in short.

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by Editor - Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It’s an evil place which keeps evil secrets of murder. Leicester town (lead, logo) is one.

The ancient and the recent secrets in this place form a line between five hundred years of falsification of the death of King Richard III on August 22, 1485; the delayed coroner’s findings on the death of Richard Mayne on July 17, 2014; and the still hidden pathologists’ report on the death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.  The public papers of all three are propaganda  concealing the truth of crimes for the benefit of potentates in London, one hundred miles to the south of Leicester.

An almost invisible and crooked line but a direct one connects Leicester,  its university,  its coronial court and coroner, the university’s forensic professors,  and a Leicester newspaper from the Battle of Bosworth Field, to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and several poisonings attributed by the British Crown to Russian assasssins between March and June of 2018.

This is how to draw the line, and the lesson to be drawn from it.

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by Editor - Tuesday, April 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Pundits, journalists and public intellectuals don’t commit suicide for professional reasons. And not since Diogenes, the Cynic of Athens, have they opted to live in a barrel, keep the company of dogs, and urinate on their audience.

Even among the most progressive of current journalists, it’s difficult for them not to follow, sit, stay, or bark on the leash  and command of their masters. .  These days the Substack paywall behind their scoops doesn’t pay enough to buy dogfood.  Seymour Hersh’s million for his Nord Stream story is the exception that proves the rule. 

Patriotism is the safer, better-paying refuge for journalists, even when they risk indictments for being scoundrels — like Evan Gershkovich, the first Moscow Times  reporter since Catherine Belton to be recognized in Russia for what he has been doing.  

Looked at closely, the evidence of espionage against Gershkovich turns out to be much more than a bark up the wrong tree, as Washington officials claim, and Russian government statements deny.In Russian this evidence is already appearing in print from Gershkovich’s friends and contacts. It has yet to be recognized in the US media.  

There is already enough to reveal  close parallels between the Russian indictment of Gershkovich and the wording of the US government’s espionage case against Julian Assange. This evidence  adds unexpected exchange value for Gershkovich – and to a turn of events to come which neither side will have anticipated.

Listen to the discussion in the first segment of this week’s War of the Worlds.  

And then for the first analysis in the English language of what the rebellion of the French against President Emmanuel Macron means for the US and NATO war against Russia, listen to Slobodan Despot.

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by Editor - Sunday, April 2nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The NATO intelligence publicity department known as Bellingcat has just produced new NATO-sourced evidence of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game which the navies and air forces of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and the US played against Russian forces in the Baltic Sea off Bornhom Island in the week before the detonation of explosives on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September 26.

Cat and mouse is also the game the NATO propaganda agencies are now playing.  

The aim of the intelligence, published last week by the quasi-state German media platform called T-Online,  and in the Danish offshoot of Bellingcat known as Oliver Alexander,  is to accuse the Russian Navy of the pipeline attack, using a mini-submarine and deep-sea divers. This is based on NATO and US identification and tracking of a six-vessel Russian flotilla several days before the explosions – an intelligence vessel, a deep-sea operations vessel, two tugs, and heavily armed anti-ship and anti-submarine frigate and corvette.

“It was precisely such mini-submarines that could have placed the explosive charges attaching it to the pipelines, experts suspected from the very start,” T-Online claims, using the hypothetical followed by a conditional plus three more hypotheticals.

“If it was confirmed that the SS-750 was at the scene, the Russian Navy would probably be the prime suspect from then on. ‘It would make absolute sense to use something like the AS-26 for such an attack,” Danish corvette captain and military analyst Johannes Riber told T-Online about this matter. ‘That would be the most plausible explanation so far for what happened to the Nord Stream pipeline.’” T-Online concluded: “In official statements, the activities of the Russian navy in the days before the attacks have so far played no role. Neither the German, Danish or Swedish investigators, nor NATO or the armed forces of the Baltic Sea states wanted to comment on them when asked by T-Online. Thus, the criminal case remains unsolved for the time being, but a chain of evidence has been added. It does not point to the USA or Ukraine. Some tracks now are leading to Moscow.”

Riber, the Danish navy source, has made a career chain of working in NATO staffs, as well as under US commands in Iraq and Bahrain.  In addition, T-Online claims its evidence has come from US satellite imagery and “sources in the security community”.

In parallel publication under his own name, Alexander has been less forensically direct, more circumstantial. The Russian vessels were “possibly… in close proximity to the Nord Stream sabotage site”.  This is circumstantial guilt by geographical association; Alexander camouflages it by a disclaimer: “In conclusion, OSINT [Open Source Intelligence] alone cannot solve the mystery of the Nord Stream sabotage or what these vessels were doing on September 21st-23rd, a few days before the explosions. It does however seem likely that the unusual events on these dates are somehow a key part of the Nord Stream sabotage mystery.”

The sourcing for Alexander’s claims is “an intelligence source [who] had told [T-Online] the names of six Russian naval vessels that were reportedly spotted in the vicinity of the Nord Stream sabotage site. With this information, I have spent the past week collecting and analyzing any open source information I could find in order to try to corroborate as much of their information as possible.”   

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by Editor - Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
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