By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There has never been any possibility that Russian Army Colonel Sergei Muchkaev, commander of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the 20^th Guards Army, would respond to allegations by Bellingcat, their NATO sources, and Dutch state prosecutors. No possibility whatsoever.

For more than five years they have been claiming that Muchkaev had given the orders to move a BUK-TELAR missile battery from the brigade base in Kursk across the border into Ukraine in July 2014, and there to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17 of that year.  

No army in the world, least of all the NATO armies in their war preparations against the Russian Army, would allow a fishing expedition by a secret judge and his military intelligence helpers to interrogate a serving officer for information about the command, control, communications, and operational orders of his unit. But that is exactly what the Dutch judge presiding at the MH17 trial, Hendrik Steenhuis, and the investigating judge assisting him in secret, have been attempting for several months. Last month, on November 2, Steenhuis ordered the trial to be delayed until next February while Muchkaev was pursued by the Dutchmen.   

This past Wednesday, December 8, Steenhuis announced in court what he and his government superiors had been expecting. In a letter apparently dated December 3, the Russian authorities reportedly said they would not allow questioning of Muchkaev. Steenhuis said the Russian letter claimed as its legal authority the European Convention for Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters – a treaty both the Dutch and Russian governments have ratified.

Steenhuis did not quote the Russian government letter. Instead, he claimed he was reporting what he had been told by the secret investigating judge who had received the Russian letter last week.  According to Steenhuis, he was told the Russian Justice Ministry had said that “pursuant to the European Convention for Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters such a request [for Muchkaev to be questioned] can be rejected if the requested party, in this case the Russian Federation, is of the opinion that execution of the request may harm the essential interests of the country.”   — Min 10:38.

Steenhuis went on to claim he had been told by the investigating judge that the letter from Moscow claimed “the questions in the [Dutch] documents [plural] received which were going to be asked of the witness Muchkaev” involved classified military matters, disclosure of which is prohibited by Russian law.  Accordingly, Steenhuis claimed the Russian letter claimed the questioning “may cause damage to state secrets of the Russian Federation, and consequently to essential interests of the Russian Federation. In view of the above” – Steenhuis talking – the Justice Ministry refused to send the Dutch request to a Russian court to order Muchkaev to testify. “This was the reaction of the Russian Federation” – Min 11:19.

But was it? That’s to say, was Steenhuis quoting from the exact words of the Russian letter, and was he quoting all of them?

In his brief announcement, Steenhuis has made it appear the Russia government won’t allow their officer to testify because of a single provision in the Mutual Assistance Convention behind which the Russians are hiding what the Dutch have already accused Muchkaev of doing. Not only has Steenhuis  used the court to announce the innuendo that Muchkaev is guilty of the shoot-down of MH17. Steenhuis has also implied there was only one provision in the Convention identified in the Russian letter, and that’s the guilty secret one.

In fact, the Convention provides several quite different provisions for the Russian refusal – one of which blocks evidence fishing expeditions; another which blocks attempts to pursue politically motivated allegations and show-trial prosecutions; and yet another which exempts serving soldiers.

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by Editor - Friday, December 10th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Behind the penetration-proof walls and the top-secret record of what was said, if the small print of their communiqués is the truth, President Joseph Biden has agreed to reduce the risk of US attack on Russia, and President Vladimir Putin to reduce the risk of Russian attack on Ukraine.

“A lot of give and take,” Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called the exchange in his post-summit briefing for the press.  Reduce instability, increase transparency, de-escalate threat of war – Sullivan added. “The United States and our European allies would engage in a larger discussion that covers strategic issues, including our strategic concerns with Russia and Russia’s strategic concerns. We managed to do this at the height of the Cold War and we developed mechanisms to help reduce instability and increase transparency.”

Russia cannot accept the threat of attack from NATO’s “attempts to develop Ukrainian territory and is building up military potential near our borders,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin report.    “Therefore, Russia is seriously interested in obtaining reliable, legally fixed guarantees that exclude the expansion of NATO in the eastern direction and the deployment of offensive weapons systems [наступательных систем вооружений] in neighbouring states with Russia.”

“You, Americans, are worried about our battalions, on Russian territory, thousands of kilometres from the United States,” Putin said, according to the press briefing by Yury Ushakov, Putin’s  foreign policy advisor and Sullivan’s Kremlin counterpart. “But we are truly concerned about our own security.”  

Putin is repeating what Sullivan and Ushakov call the “strategic concerns”  — the cross-hairs warning of May 2016; the 12-minute red line warning of February 2019; and last week’s 5-minute warning of hypersonic weapon response.  This time there’s reason to believe Putin and Biden have agreed on a sequence of reciprocal moves to test the give and the take at the strategic level, not at the level of the fighting on the Ukraine front.  For the moment, these moves are semi-secret. If they don’t materialise between now and Christmas, then the promise, as Ushakov calls them of their teams and representatives “to enter into contact soon about these sensitive questions” will come to nothing.

There’s also reason to expect the last people to accept this will be the managers and journalists of the mainstream Anglo-American media and the schemers of Vladimir Zelensky’s (lead image, left) regime in Kiev. The propaganda war will continue without let-up; so will the shelling of the Donbass.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 7th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 7th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

About the Russiagate operation that continues in the US, Richard Sakwa (lead image), a professor at the University of Kent, has gotten one thing right and one thing wrong. The wrong turns out to be the same thing as the right.

Russiagate, he says, defining that as the narrative of Russian interference in US politics in support of Donald Trump, “is one of the most mystifying yet consequential events of our time.” At the same time, Russiagate is a propaganda and deception operation aimed at achieving the political interests of the Democratic Party, their candidates and supporters. “What if Russian actions during the 2016 were minimal and defensive, and there was no grand plot”, Sakwa asks rhetorically, not quite agreeing to answer for himself. “In that case the endless years of the Russiagate scandal, in which every scrap of evidence was portrayed as the ‘smoking gun’ before being  discredited” turn out to be “deception.. defined as the deliberate attempt on the part of leaders to mislead the public about the thrust of official thinking…  Such deceptions are now routine in US politics.”

A deception cannot be either mystifying or consequential if it’s routine. But if the Russiagate operation is routine, then the truth of the  narrative doesn’t stop the repetition, and the falsehood doesn’t matter to the public. Accordingly, the New York Times insists it will continue reporting under its headline of last week: “Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation?”.

The newspaper knows this is a successful money-making formula; indeed, it admits it is making more revenue than ever, and more profit too. “This was our best third-quarter performance in both News and total net subscription additions since the launch of the digital pay model more than a decade ago,” the company’s chief executive announced on November 1;  “and, outside of 2020, our best quarter ever for digital subscription additions.”  With 90% of the New York Times’ subscriptions now digital, the management is convinced that fake news is profitable – that clickbait works.  New York Times reporters won’t retract or apologize for lying when the lies generate bigger dividends for the shareholders, bigger bonuses for management and reporters.

Nothing new about this. What is  new is the behaviour of the alternative  media in marketing their truth of the Russiagate story.  Sakwa has made his book out of balancing what the mainstream media fakers have reported and what the alt-media reporters have to report of the truth. The audience measures, subscription numbers, and balance-sheets of the alt-media are more secret than publicly owned media companies but the marketing tactics are the same – they report the truths which make the mainstream media out to be liars; they repeat this over and over for clickbait effect.

Sakwa hasn’t interviewed a direct source for anything in his book. He appears not to know US government officials or Russian government officials, lawyers or detectives.  He acknowledges his limitation with this excuse — “the fundamental methodological problem [is] that we still do not know what really happened. Much of the relevant material remains classified.” So his book is composed of secondary-source quotes from one side or another – from liars and truth-tellers carefully balanced.

But what’s the point of Sakwa’s balance?  Do lies get less false by balancing them against the truth? Does the truth get weaker or stronger by balancing them with lies? Is the reader to be persuaded arithmetically – by the number of secondary views cited on one side or the other of the veracity line?

The answer, yes or no, to these questions is so obvious, it should be reckoned silly to ask them. But why is Sakwa selling his 555-page book for the premium price of $120; or to be less capitalistic, why should a reader pay? That’s a rhetorical question.

So why read on? To see the paradox Sakwa seems not to have spotted.  

On the one hand, as Sakwa did notice in passing, American voters don’t think the Russiagate story, or in fact anything to do with Russia, is of any importance to the way they have recently voted or will vote at presidential or congressional elections.    On the other hand, as the balance-sheet of the New York Times proves every quarter, the voters who read such newspapers will keep paying to be persuaded or deceived – and then disregard the Russian material when they vote.

Put these two parts of the paradox together, et voila! the conclusion is that Russiagate has proved to be a commercially profitable plot of the media, alt-media no less than mainstream media,  which has satisfied no one and stopped nothing from being repeated over and over.   

That’s also definition of the money shot in pornography. By that standard, Russiagate turns out to be the longest wank in American history (Sakwa’s too).

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by Editor - Monday, December 6th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Once upon a time, before the Blin-Noodle gang had been born; when their grandparents were still Ukrainians; and before the gang was pushing its protégés to make war on Russia from behind a shield of civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk, there was an American humourist named James Thurber. He was the 20^th century successor to the other American humourist Mark Twain. There is no one to succeed those two Americans in our time.

Thurber told a story about provocations, false warnings, and what these days is called the RED LINE. Thurber’s moral was: “Get it right or let it alone. The conclusion you jump to may be your own.”

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by Editor - Thursday, December 2nd, 2021
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By Liane Theuerkauf, Munich
  @bears_with

Igor Tarakanov is a Russian soldier.  

He first appeared publicly two weeks ago, on November 17, to say he had escorted a battery of Russian Army BUK missiles from Russia into Ukraine early in the month of July 2014; that was days before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was downed and destroyed on July 17, 2014.

Tarakanov’s claim contradicts everything known for seven years and made public by the US National Intelligence Council, State Department and White House;  the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security  Service (MIVD);  the Russian Defence Ministry;  the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) headed by Dutch police; Dutch prosecutors at the murder trial which opened in Schiphol in March 2020; the presiding judge at the trial Hendrik Steenhuis, and his secret investigating judges; the Dutch lawyers defending the  Russian Army officer in the dock;  and the agency in charge of all evidence  in the prosecution’s case file,  the Ukrainian Security Service SBU.

Tarakanov is an unusual name Russians aren’t keen to have. It means cockroach. As insects go, these are very ancient – about 350 million years – very hardy, very numerous.  There is no evidence that soldier Igor Tarakanov exists – except for a publication in English by the Bellingcat group two weeks ago, and in Russian at the same time by a related publication,  The Insider.

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by Editor - Monday, November 29th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A High Court judge in London has ruled sharply against Catherine Belton and Rupert Murdoch’s book publisher HarperCollins dismissing their principal lines of defence against a multi-million pound case for libel by Roman Abramovich and the Russian state oil company Rosneft.

Yesterday, in two detailed examinations of Belton’s allegations of a corrupt conspiracy masterminded by President Vladimir Putin and implemented by Abramovich, Rosneft and others,   Justice Amanda Tipples (lead image) dismissed the publisher’s case that Belton had been justified in reporting opinions from named or anonymous sources.  The judge’s rulings cast doubt on the credibility of Belton’s sources, requiring lawyers for the defence to show in trial next year that Belton’s reporting proves the truth of her “statements of fact”.  This sets the stage for one of the largest and most expensive court tests of truth and faking in the Anglo-American war against Russia.

Worse for Belton and HarperCollins, Tipples ruled that their allegation that Rosneft had created a fake transaction to bribe Putin with $300 million is a statement of fact which Belton is unlikely to be able to prove in the witness box on oath and under cross-examination. Tipples dismissed Belton’s method of using sources whose “denials do not provide any antidote to the information provided by Mr Kondaurov or the anonymous source.”

“This is a big blow to the anti-Russian propaganda that’s the basis for the US and European sanctions war”, a New York attorney with multinational clients comments. “It will have a bigger impact than the recent Justice Department Russiagate indictments exposing sources connected to the secret services whose lies to the media and FBI are going to land them in jail.”

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 24th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Evgeny Dobrenko (lead image, left) is a letter-perfect demonstration of several things he appears, despite years of learning at universities from Odessa to Durham (North Carolina) and Sheffield (Yorkshire), not to have heard of.  

In the academic world, like any other business, it’s the money which does the talking, pays the piper, calls the tune.  Upward mobility it is called less musically by sociologists. That means ambition fulfilled – promotion up the professorial ranks,  rising wages,  bonuses, and holiday trips which require conformity and usually a kindly attitude towards the world in return for more of its rewards.  

Downward mobility is the reverse – ambition blocked, wages declining, unkindliness toward  those individuals, institutions and states which are blamed for the individual’s fate and resented for his obscurity.   Evgeny Dobrenko blames Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin.

Starting with a surname from the Russian word meaning kind,  Dobrenko has suffered grievously from them.  He started well enough, upward for a Jewish boy from  provincial Odessa   to the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow,  a creation of the first flush of Boris Yeltsin’s administration and of Americans arriving to dismantle the Soviet state, army, banking system, and culture. Born a decade after Stalin’s death, Dobrenko managed only two years in Moscow before moving to Durham, where the university called Duke is situated. The years flew by with fellowships promising promotion and employment at more prestigious places that didn’t materialise. Dobrenko got his taste for the feast, but not a tenured seat at the table.  As he dropped professionally  downward, he took jobs at Nottingham, then Sheffield university. It was from there Dobrenko, a US citizen, has been watching Putin from afar. Between Stalin and Putin Dobrenko has detected no difference at all.

The explanation for this is also Dobrenko’s apology for himself. “The Soviet state”, he concludes, “magnified the flaws of the Russian Middle Ages… after a short pause [Yeltsin] Russia returned with such irrevocable readiness to the same fantasies of imperial grandeur and phantom pains… The country created by Stalin did not escape this past which has remained as its present. Putin’s Russia returned… in a natural fashion to late – but still not bygone – Stalinism”.

The “phantom pains”, Dobrenko explains, include “anti-liberalism, anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism… inflicted on the country, just as any autocrat transforms his personal complexes into a national agenda (such a link can be easily traced in Putin’s Russia)”.

This is conventional Russia hating and war propaganda except for an unusual twist —    Dobrenko is the director at the University of Sheffield  of the Prokhorov Centre for the Study of Central and Eastern European Intellectual and Cultural History. Named by the Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov and created with money from Prokhorov’s Moscow foundation in 2014, the University of Sheffield didn’t announce the philanthropy then or since. University officials refused this week to disclose how much money Prokhorov paid seven years ago and continues to pay today. According to the Centre website, its “strategic priority” is to address “the ideological bases for conflict and barriers to cooperation and the bridges that have been built, and could be built, towards greater understanding and collaboration.”  

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Remember the ten plagues of Pharaonic Egypt – the Israelites capitalised and made their getaway to a happy ending. The story has turned into several blockbuster movies and tons of popcorn have been consumed watching them.   

There have been two plagues on the Russian film industry, but one is permanent, and there is no escape, no happy ending, no popcorn. This is the story of how the plague of money – from the state budget, oligarch groups, and state banks – is saving the film studios and cinemas from death by coronavirus pandemic. It’s also the story of scandal and corruption around the state financing system that is killing Russian audience demand. This is a blockbuster no Russian director, studio producer, cinema operator, or even film critic dares to present in public.

There is another scandal no one in the industry acknowledges.  This is the role of the state-directed Gazprom group which acts as import agent and cinema distributor for the Hollywood studios. Counting all films which have taken more than $5 million at the Russian box office over the past fifteen years, the US hits out-number the Russian, 532 to 172. That’s a ratio of three to one.

For the time being, the state banks now shielding the cinema chains from bankruptcy see the marketing of Hollywood films as their guarantee of getting their money back with profit.    

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by Editor - Thursday, November 18th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russian poets are hardly the only ones to think they are irresistible on account of what comes out of their mouths.

The two I’ve known best, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (lead image, right) of Irkutsk and Ted Hughes of Yorkshire, were irrepressible on the point, which helps account for some of the fatuities in their poems.

It’s well-known that of the ancient Latin greats, Ovid had a laughably large nose. I suppose Catullus must have been just as ugly for his inamorata, Clodia Metelli, not to fall for his compositions. So it seems the more beautiful the poetry, the uglier the poet. Byron thought himself the exception, but wasn’t. Cavafy didn’t think so, but was.

Yevtushenko, the Russian poet who was more popular in his day than any other before or since, was quite sensitive about his nose.

When he was a teenager he “discovered in my nose if not ugliness at least some obvious duckliness. For a while I almost stopped writing poetry and wasted a huge amount of time manipulating no less than two mirrors investigating the configuration of my nose with the fragile hope that this, not the best part of my face, would improve as I asked in my prayers. But, my nose tragically refused. Having lost all hope for it I began step by step to try to adjust to my own profile. It was an additional waste of time. Only when someone’s shy lips whispered three magic words to me — and you can guess what they were — did I finally forget about this nasal problem. Until this moment I live in the pleasant illusion that I am not so ugly as to have to commit suicide.”

By the time he said that in 1994, Yevtushenko, who of course had read Gogol’s story of the man whose nose ran away from him, was kidding. Yevtushenko knew very well how he attracted women. He also knew that by then it wasn’t the poems that did the trick. Also, by then he had come to the realisation there was no place for him, nose or poetry, in the Russia which had succeeded the Soviet Union. So he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is where he was when he died aged 84 on April 1, 2017.

He was taken to Moscow for burial. Representing the state at the funeral was Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the most powerful figure in the country after the President Vladimir Putin. What Yevtushenko would have resented about that was that Putin didn’t appear in person.

For his burial Yevtushenko scored another career goal. His grave is beside Boris Pasternak’s, a writer and poet Yevtushenko thought, and said publicly, was an inferior and a mediocrity.    In the end, Russian politics has reduced the two of them to the same level in the ground – except that as he went down,  Yevtushenko demonstrated he understood Russian politics much better, and the discreditable role the Russian intelligentsia usually plays —  before the Revolution, during Stalin, during Yeltsin, nowadays.  Yevtushenko said so; Pasternak didn’t dare.

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 16th, 2021
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