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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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The morning public record issued by the Kremlin of the talks yesterday in Moscow between President Vladimir Putin and President Emmanuel Macron remains for the moment in Russian.    The official English transcript will follow later today.

The two presidents met for almost six hours, and then held a press conference for just over one hour. The unofficial translation into English runs for about 7,000 words, including names and reporters’ questions.  

To understand the significance what the two state officials have said, it is necessary to read their words, and to count their key words.

This count will explain the meaning of Macron’s declaration that peace, security, and stability in Europe, and in the Ukraine, are for Europeans to agree with Russia.  “President Putin and I agree,” Macron said. “Russia is a European country. Anyone who sees Europe should be able to work with Russia, find ways to build a future in Europe and with Europeans.” As for what those ways are in the Ukraine, Macron declared: “The solution of the Ukrainian issue can only be political, and the basis of this solution can be these Minsk agreements. The Normandy format is the right format, I repeat, around the table, in this format Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany. We continue our efforts within the Normandy format in order to fully implement the Minsk Agreements and to resolve the conflict in the Donbas.”

This is the part to read. Now go to the count.

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by Editor - Tuesday, February 8th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A soldier who lays a booby trap for his adversary thinks him fool enough to be tricked or lured to his own death. He thinks his enemy is inferior and deserves death. He hates him.

The German expression for war planned and executed like this is rassenkampf, race war. The German generals who planned and executed the 1941 invasion of Russia, Operation BARBAROSSA, claimed they didn’t hate the Russians. Their war was krieg ohne hass, war without hate. They said that after their surrender or capture, when they were facing war crimes trials.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image, centre) hates Russians; thinks them inferior to Americans; fools compared to himself; deserving of the fate Blinken intends for them.  The evidence is in the booby traps Blinken set in the document the State Department arranged to leak in a Spanish newspaper last week. It is called “NON-PAPER CONFIDENTIAL/REL RUSSIA Areas of Engagement to Improve Security”.

The State Department has announced in a double negative that it has “seen nothing to suggest these documents are not authentic.”  

The paper claims to be a “response to Russia’s request that the United States provide a direct written response to Russia’s draft treaty proposal”. What follows is not a direct response to the seven substantive Russian treaty articles. Instead, it lays a booby trap for each of the seven Russian proposals with a reaffirmation of the US intention to continue with its plans to attack Russia from the territories of other states, from international waters and the airspace bordering on Russia – and much more.

To camouflage these booby traps, the Blinken paper lists these intentions as “Concerns”. The Blinken paper has issued 55 lines of “Concerns” one for each of the 55 lines of “US Position”.

Only three of the Russian treaty articles are identified in the Blinken paper – Articles 5, 6, and 7. By ignoring the first four articles of the Russian treaty the Blinken paper has declared its refusal  “not to undertake actions nor participate in or support activities that affect the security of the other Party” (Article 1); its dismissal of the “core security interests of the other Party”; and its rejection of “the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations (Article 2).”

The Blinken paper also declares the US intention to continue to  “use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party” (Article 3); to encourage “further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization”(Article 4); and to plan to “establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them” (Article 4).

In the Blinken paper, that last point means it no longer matters to the US whether Ukraine joins NATO or not. The US intends to make war on Russia from the territory of the Ukraine across the Red Line.

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

Hatred of the Russian race and Russophobia are more than a thousand years old in Europe – long enough for everyone nowadays to realise there’s no cure for them.  At least not by rational persuasion, not by words.  Remission by force of arms is another matter altogether.

A Swiss history of the phenomenon in Europe, starting in France in Charlemagne’s time and ending on the Donbass contact line since 2014, explains why the stakes along that line are so great now. The book is also an aid to comprehending why in this week’s telephone conversation between the chief Russian and American negotiators, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image, 1^st right) demonstrated the futility of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s (3^rd right) talking with him again.*  

The Swiss history, published by Guy Mettan in 2017 as President Donald Trump was taking office in Washington, reveals a hopefulness that is impossible now. “Will Trump know how”, Mettan asks in his last paragraph, “will he still want to, or will he simply give up on trying to turn the tide and bring back civility in the relations between the West and Russia? Is a respite in what is turning out to be a new Cold War at all possible?” Mettan answered himself: “We certainly wish so. After all, if the task is almost superhuman, as no one will doubt after reading this book, it just may not be altogether impossible.”

Squeezing between that double negative there is in fact no space, no hope.

Mettan has written a primer on this brand of racism, noting that “Russophobia, contrary to French Anglophobia and Germanophobia, is a phenomenon that, though different of course, resembles anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. Like anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it is not a transitory phenomenon linked to specific historical events; it exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim’s alleged behaviour or characteristics.”

In Mettan’s history, American Russophobia “begins where the French, the English, and the Germans left off. It is a dynamic synthesis of French liberal-democratic Russophobia and English and German imperialist Russophobias.”  To Mettan the American phenomenon of today is a millennial climax of sorts. It‘s the apogee and the perigee, the final form of confidence in pursuing genocidal war against the Russians who resist and subjugation of those who remain,  which the German leadership held in June 1941.

According to Mettan, though, the adoption of Russophobia as US state policy since 1945  has reversed the outcome of the last war for the Germans. “This is how, in less than a quarter century, without striking a single blow Germany has just won the First and Second World Wars!”

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

During the US Army invasion of Morocco and Algeria in 1943, enroute to the invasion of Italy, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as the CIA was called then, came up with the donkey turd bomb for destroying the enemy. Since 2014, the CIA has come up with the modern equivalent – it’s called the Ukrainian bomb.  The first was designed to kill Germans. The second is designed to kill Russians. Both of them,   donkey turds and Ukrainians, are failing to hit their mark.

The donkey turd was the name and brainchild of a Harvard professor called Carleton Coon. In designing an American version of an improvised explosive device, Coon said that because  donkey turds were more common on the ground in Morocco than stones, bombs would be more effectively disguised to look like donkey turds.

The US didn’t fight any Germans in Morocco or Algeria. The US invasion promised the Arabs their national sovereignty and independence — — President Franklin Roosevelt was explicit on the point — but that was a calculated deception. The territories were returned to the French. After the US invasions of Italy, then France, the locals were again promised their national sovereignty and independence, but that too was an American deception. The territories were returned to those who accepted the terms of US occupation. They continue in their capitulation to this day, but the terms have been modified according to the American principle of US-directed and managed collective security. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) is the main organisation for implementing this.

The defeated Germans, half of them to start with, retreated back into the territory from which they had come, the western half of Germany that is, between 1946 and 1990. The Soviet Army had defeated the Germans who had invaded the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and driven them back to the Berlin checkpoint. Until the Soviet terms were modified by Mikhail Gorbachev to accept Soviet withdrawal from eastern Germany, this is the way collective security operated in Europe — two opposing alliance forces confronting each other but deterring an attack from either side.

Gorbachev retreated on the US promise that NATO wouldn’t move forward. It was a promise Gorbachev was a fool to believe. He only had to ask the Moroccans or Algerians whether the Americans keep their promises, and he would have been told they don’t.  He wanted to believe otherwise. His successor Boris Yeltsin was just as ready to believe American deceptions until NATO invaded and bombed Serbia; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin believed they depended on the Americans to keep their power in Moscow.

Vladimir Putin tried to believe the promises until 2014 when the war to advance US occupation to the Russian frontier began in earnest. At that border, there is nowhere but inside Russia for the Russians to retreat to, just as they had when the Germans invaded in 1941. Putin announced there was no retreat in his speech to the Russian officer corps last month.   This marked the end of his accommodations with the advancing NATO forces and US nuclear warheads.  

In the line of this advance, the Russian Foreign Ministry proposed two treaties on the principle of indivisible security in Europe.  This principle means that one state cannot, and promises it will not,  increase its military capacities in such a way as to threaten the security of a neighbouring state in the same geopolitical space.   The treaties have also proposed there will be no more donkey turd bombs – no more Ukrainian, Romanian, Polish and other nuclear-armed missiles within close range of Russia’s capital, military command control centres, and land-based nuclear missile bases.

The principle of indivisible security, aka Russian self-defence, now confronts the principle of collective security, aka NATO forward defence, along a red line which runs from the Baltic Sea southward down the eastern Ukrainian border to the Black Sea, to Romania and the other littoral states, including Turkey. On Thursday the US rejected indivisible security, and thus the two draft treaties.  On Friday, at a 90-minute radio interview in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained why the conflict of the two security principles cannot result in a Russian retreat.*  

This fight is now the last stand for the American empire in Europe which began with the donkey turd bomb 79 years ago.

Lavrov’s speech reveals that from the history of that period, from the destruction of Arab sovereignty, and through the destruction of European sovereignty, and through the near- destruction of Russian sovereignty by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the Russians have learned a lesson which they cannot now unlearn and from which they cannot retreat. No retreat – that’s the lesson.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 30th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed publicly in Geneva on Friday, January 21,  that he will not negotiate a no-war agreement with the Russians because he cannot. This is already understood by the Russians; by the French and Germans; and by several senior officials of the Biden Administration.

The evidence of Blinken’s incapacity is in the words he says.

It was during the last world war,  when US policymakers had next to no intelligence on how their German counterparts were thinking and what they were intending,   that a group of American sociologists were engaged by the War Department, as the Pentagon was called then,  to do what was called content analysis of German propaganda.   One of the sociologists, a Russian émigré Nathan Leites, went on to apply the same method to Soviet publications in order to uncover what Leites  called the operational code of the Politburo.  That was in 1951. It was immediately used by US negotiators during the Korean War armistice negotiations which began in July of that year and ran for two years. By then Leites had produced a sequel, A Study of Bolshevism. Both were paid for and published by RAND, the think-tank created in 1945 by the US Air Force, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the War Department.

Since then the method has not been used on US Government officials, at least not by RAND nor publicly by any American sociologist.  

When the RAND method is used to analyze what Blinken told the  US press, following his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, it is revealed that Blinken has no intention whatever of negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Russians on any terms. According to the scientific method devised by the best and brightest Americans for dealing with their enemies, it’s now clear from Blinken’s own words that he is unable to understand what Russians tell him. In the mind behind the words there is only one compulsive idea – attack, punish, destroy Russia.

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

Two Swiss bankers for fugitive Russian bank robber Sergei Pugachev have been convicted for the second time in Switzerland of violations of Switzerland’s money-laundering law and regulations.

Pugachev is a major source reported by Catherine Belton for the April 2020 book, Putin’s People. She and the Reuters special “enterprise unit” in New York which employs her, have not reported the evidence or the convictions in the Swiss case.

The Swiss court has attempted to keep the identities of the two bankers and their bank secret. The 38-page text of the judgement against them was dated by the court on May 31, 2021,  but   not issued until July 27. It was not published until October 1.  It has not been discovered by the press until now.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 19th, 2022
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