by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Inoculation against tuberculosis, the official Soviet state policy for almost a century, continues to shield the Russian population with a higher level of immunological resistance than those in Europe and the US who lack the vaccination.  This has also been a well-tested finding in western and Indian medical publications; in India   vaccination against TB is mandatory.  This link between the anti-TB vaccination and the rate and severity of Covid-19 infection is now official Russian policy.

“According to some data, those who are vaccinated with BCG [Bacillus Calmette–Guérin vaccine], the course of Covid-19 is lighter,” the Health Minister Vitaly Murashko announced earlier this month.    “This is now widely discussed in international reviews. The fact is that it can have a certain meaning, it probably can,” Veronika Skvortsova followed, telling national television news. “For now I think that we won’t discuss the mechanisms of immune restructuring, but [CBG vaccination] does play a role.”  Skvortsova was Murashko’s predecessor as health minister between 2012 and February of this year; she is now director of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA).

Caution: the link is a statistical correlation. It is not a finding that is clear on the biomedical mechanism which is at work in the lungs. But because the correlation is a strong one, there’s another conclusion which the Russian medical administration has begun to emphasize. This is to rebuild the public health measures of the Soviet period which were destroyed by the virus introduced by President Boris Yeltsin and his chief of staff and privatizer of state property, Anatoly Chubais, from the virus source in Washington during the 1990s.

by Editor - Monday, April 13th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Paul Robinson (lead image, right), a professor at the University of Ottawa, has published a defence of the British Government’s indictment of the Russian Government for an attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent. “That’s the official narrative, which most people accept”, according to Robinson. He wants you to know he does too.

To the analysis of evidence of what happened, and didn’t happen,  in the Salisbury town incidents of March 4, 2018, and the legal consquences which have ensued over the two years since, Robinson concludes: “I can only say ‘phooey’.” In what Robinson calls a book review of “Skripal in Prison”, he has concluded: “Helmer [lead image, left] produces not a jot of evidence…I find it odd, therefore, that he’s so keen to let the Russians off the hook for the Skripal poisoning. Perhaps the reason lies in his conspiratorial frame of mind…He’s the sort of guy who thinks that for every crime the GRU have committed, MI6 and the CIA have committed two. It’s not my frame of mind at all. But then perhaps I’m part of the conspiracy too!”

Robinson teaches politics. In his past, he was educated at Oxford University and between 1989 and 1994 he was a Russia analyst in the British Army Intelligence Corps, before serving as a reservist in the Canadian military with the same function. In the secret services and in universities, Robinson has never been subject to the British legal standards of evidence or proof of crime beyond reasonable doubt. That is, until he launched this attack in defence of his old British Army oath, and then ran into a cross-examination on a different oath – the courtroom one to tell the truth. You be the jury. 

by Editor - Sunday, April 12th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It is now a fortnight since President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) announced  a tax on Russians exporting their cash and capital to tax avoidance havens abroad;  and since Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin followed to explain that Cyprus is the target. “We have started implementing the instructions on taxing dividends from foreign accounts with Cyprus”, Mishustin said at a Kremlin meeting with Putin on April 1. “The Cypriot government has been notified of the changes in the agreement on avoiding dual taxation.”  

 “For Putin to make his remark in a national address,” comments a Moscow finance source, “and then for Mishustin to confirm that Cyprus was intended in the President’s speech shows this is now a high priority move.  It reveals how upset the Kremlin – especially Andrei Belousov [first deputy prime minister] — has been with the role Cyprus plays in the outflow of Russian capital. I do not see any government allowing capital flight now during a deep and lasting recession.”

“This sounds a death knell for Cyprus accountants and law firms,” says a Limassol investor. “This is their biggest business. From now on only the most hardened criminals or escapees from Russia will be here.”

There has been a flurry of press leaks from Cyprus Government officials claiming that the Russian move is not targeting Cyprus. But no official at the Foreign and Finance Ministries in Moscow, nor at the Russian Embassy in Nicosia, has said this on the record. According to Mishustin and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, the new rules are still being decided, and will be announced on April 24.     

By the way, the kibosh was an iron bar used two hundred years ago by cobblers in the north of England to flatten leather as they were making clogs. When the word reached the streets of London, it meant flatten in more ways than that one. The government of President Nicos Anastasiades (lead image, right) and Nicos Christodoulides, his foreign minister and aspiring successor, having chosen last year to cut their ties to Russia in exchange for American promises to protect the island from the Turks, is the clog in this story.

by Editor - Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Late last week the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) agreed unanimously on a statement of “solidarity of countries in the fight against the pandemic”. They also agreed unanimously there is “no place for any form of discrimination, racism and xenophobia in the response to the pandemic.”

On the explicit opposition of Ukraine, Georgia, the US, the UK, and the European Union, the UN did not agree on “the rejection of trade wars and the use of unilateral sanctions adopted in circumvention of the UN Security Council to ensure urgent access to food and medicine, as well as countering financial speculation with essential goods.”  This was the language of a resolution drafted by Russia.

Thus has the world decided that warfare is an essential service and should continue without lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, hand-washing, or restriction of any kind.

by Editor - Tuesday, April 7th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Now for a psycho-shocker of a spy story in which the National Security Agency’s (NSA) chief of the Research Directorate goes head to head with Russians whom his research proves tried “to change the outcome of our presidential election”, and then tried to kill Sergei Skripal to “serve[d] as a warning to Russia’s adversaries”.

The psycho-shock has already happened to the NSA chief and storyteller, Eric Haseltine (lead images),  so he is paralysed by a Russian weapon that’s about to psycho-shock the reader. That’s you.

After you read this, you will never again be able to type on a keyboard without anticipating that the “diabolically clever” Russians are reading every word. But maybe you are suspicious the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might be doing the same thing? “Naw”, says Michael Arneson, Haseltine’s hero and NSA engineer from a dirt poor Minnesota family with no more than a high school diploma, and whose favourite drink is Mr Pibb. “The CIA is way too incompetent to create something this good.”  In this tale,  American heroes fit to fight the Russians and save you from your keyboards,  talk like that.

by Editor - Monday, April 6th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Dutch lawyers leading the defence against the charge of premeditated murder in the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, have no experience of litigation in cases involving aircraft crashes, war crimes, military crimes, or homicide – except for cases when they have defended Dutch police accused of shooting people on the streets of Rotterdam.     

The first of the defence lawyers, Sabine ten Doesschate, has never conducted a defence in a murder trial; in her short career so far, she has specialized in white collar fraud. Her leader, Boudewijn van Eijck, has a career record of defending Rotterdam police in collaboration with Rotterdam police commanders and prosecutors; at the time they included Fred Westerbeke, lead prosecutor of the MH17 investigation, and Dedy Woei-A-Tsoi, one of the three prosecutors now in court.

Asked if his relationships with them create a conflict for him to defend in this trial, van Eijck  refuses to answer.  “Our focus is the MH17 case,” he said through a spokesman on Friday, “not the professional careers of the lawyers.”

Ten Doeschate and van Eijck have announced they have engaged a Dutch public relations company called Headline Communications and a spokesman named Martin van Putten.  The company has no operating record in The Netherlands. Responding to questions emailed over two weeks about the two lawyers, their expertise to mount a professional defence, and their conflicts of interest, Van Putten at first lied; then insisted “we do not comment in the media until after the next [court] session on June 8^th.”  When asked by telephone to clarify the lawyers’ silence and misleading statements he has made on their behalf, he cut the telephone line.

The third lawyer on the team, Yelena Kutyina, is a Moscow lawyer with trial experience defending media personalities in assault and injury compensation claims and appearing herself as a judge in television courtroom shows.  Asked to describe her experience in criminal trials, Kutyina refuses to answer.

“So far as I can tell,” commented veteran war crimes defence lawyer Christopher Black, a Canadian, “so far as I can tell, they are not acting like a real defence.”

by Editor - Sunday, April 5th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The US satellite images proving that a BUK missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, have existed for twenty-three days – between July 20 and August 12, 2014. Since then they ceased to exist.  Since then too, for almost six years, no US Government official has claimed in public, nor told Dutch police, prosecutors, or military intelligence officials in secret, that the images can be viewed with the naked eye.

A week ago, on March 23, Hendrik Steenhuis, a judge of The Hague District Court, ordered the production and disclosure of these US satellite images as evidence in the trial of four men accused of transporting the missile to its launch site, participating in the order to fire, and intending to kill all 298 people on board the aircraft.

Steenhuis, the presiding trial judge, gave Dutch prosecutors until June 8 to comply with the order and prove the satellite images exist. If they do not, the foundation of the case against the four accused, and against the Russian military and political command for ordering the BUK launched, will collapse.

Lawyers with experience in comparable international tribunals are sceptical of both Judge Steenhuis’s order, and of the likelihood the US Government and Dutch prosecutors will obey it.  Christopher Black was a Canadian lawyer for the defence in the Yugoslav trials beginning in 1993, and the Rwanda trials commencing in 1994. He says: “In our trial at the ICTR [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] we pushed the judges to order the prosecution to produce what they claimed they had. Several times under our browbeating, they did make such orders. But they were never followed up. The prosecution never complied, even when a couple of times they were roasted by the judges for disregarding their orders. They didn’t care and nothing was done. We think it was all window-dressing for the press in order to make the judges appear neutral when they were part of the prosecution.”

by Editor - Tuesday, March 31st, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“The immediate priority is to prevent the quick spread of this disease”, President Vladimir Putin (lead image, top left) declared in his state speech on the corona virus last week.  

This is the point on which there is no disagreement, not now at least. But how restrictive for the economy the anti-contagion measures should be, and at what cost compared to the cost of the virus impact on life and death, is a point of considerable debate, inside Russia as everywhere else. That is the point which Putin avoided. He is not alone among the heads of state or government in the rest of the world.  What is the difference then between Putin and all of them?

by Editor - Monday, March 30th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“Where no case is made out against a man, or such a flimsy one that it cannot stand on its feet, he is entitled to say: ‘I ask the jury to say that I am not guilty without hearing a word from me.’”

That sentence was written almost sixty years ago by one of the most brilliant tellers of courtroom stories in the English language, Henry Cecil. Nom de plume of an English county court judge,  Cecil  put the words in the mouth of the barrister for the defendant, in his summing-up for the jury. The story is a whodunit, with much of Cecil’s characteristic poking of fun and then, at the end — well, a surprise I shan’t reveal.

In the tale of the trial of four defendants accused of murder in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17, there are no jokes. But the proceedings which commenced at Schiphol, in The Netherlands, on March 9 and adjourned on March 23 for ten weeks, did have a surprise ending. That is also the point of Cecil’s defence speech. The point is that the Dutch prosecutors have revealed the case they are making out against the defendants, and also,  they insist, against the Russian state, is such a flimsy one, it cannot stand on its own feet. It should therefore be dismissed by the panel of three judges.

Recognizing this in his first ruling, issued on March 23, Hendrik Steenhuis, the presiding judge, gave the prosecution, the Dutch Government behind them,  and the US Government behind them,  one last chance.

This was his order to produce in court the crucial piece of evidence on which the case of murder depends – the US satellite images which US officials have long claimed to prove the firing of a BUK missile at MH17 and to have reported in secret to Dutch intelligence. But since the evidence of the chief of Dutch military intelligence, and also of the investigating police and prosecutors – official secrets now leaked in public – is that the US has not provided the evidence, the judge’s order is an ultimatum.

If the evidence isn’t produced by June 8, when the court resumes, the court will be asked to rule that the defendants have no case to answer.

by Editor - Sunday, March 29th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Sunday, March 22, Russia’s Defence Ministry sent more than fifteen Ilyushin heavy transport planes to Rome with medical aid to Italy, setting up a special medical headquarters at Bergamo, in the Lombady region of northern Italy.  This is the largest Russian aid operation in Europe since World War II.

To avoid US intervention to stop it, the air convoy flew across Turkish and Greek airspace, avoiding Ukraine and Poland. As military secrets go, the operational plan devised by Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Italian counterpart, Lorenzo Guerini, was a near-perfect success.

Recriminations followed the next day from the Financial Times which accused Moscow of  trying to “exploit EU tensions over medical export bans and delays in financial support.”  The newspaper quoted the director of an Italian think-tank, Nathalie Tocci, as saying “Russia needs a quick win, so it wants to act fast…It does what Russia always does, which is seize low-hanging fruit.” Tocci and her think-tank are employed by NATO, the European Commission, the European External Action Service, and the European Defence Agency.

by Editor - Wednesday, March 25th, 2020
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