by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Political fog and the fog of war are different. The first is a way of believing first, seeing afterwards. The second is what happens when the weapons of camouflage and deception combine with confusion and fear to make seeing clearly impossible.
Follow last week’s events as they happened in Damascus, Istanbul and Tehran.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
“From now onwards you tell the truth, and that’s it”, Robert Fisk, one of the few British journalists who do, explained recently for a television documentary that this was the credo he learned from his job.
He’s still being published in a London newspaper controlled by the Lebedev family; their capacity for printing lies has not been dissuaded or diminished by Fisk’s example.
Still, it’s the time of the year when you and I wish each other the hope that the future will turn out better than it’s proved to be recently; and when we take time for reflection on the likelihood of this; also the time to gather the energy to cope with the greater unlikelihood.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
During President Vladimir Putin’s four-and-a-half hour press conference on Thursday – the second longest on record in Russia; the longest in the rest of the world — he was congratulated several times by the audience for the answers he gave about the running of Russia. This is a regular feature. Putin’s arranger Dmitry Peskov – his “boss” Putin called him at one point — didn’t have to try hard to produce it.
After the conference concluded, the president’s critics attacked him for saying nothing new, repeating himself, evading the point of the question, making promises he doesn’t intend to keep, etc. The critics always say this. It’s their regular feature. This is cyclical, according to one of the Twitter comments. “If there is anyone who wants to watch Putin’s news conference but cannot do it today, don’t worry. Next year you will watch a re-run.”
What was new this time was that in Putin’s performance, he cited 36 sets of state statistics in answer to 55 questions. Subtracting the time taken by the questioners and Peskov’s audience management, Putin produced the numbers, new sets of them, every five minutes.
They covered, in his sequence: climate change; garbage recycling; production capacity; airports; highways; farm exports; mines; doctors’ pay; new medical facilities, vehicles and equipment; heart disease, tuberculosis and child mortality rates; Ukrainian Army tanks; Ukrainian gas prices; Fareast mortgages; housing replacement; political party registrations; inflation; reserve fund outlays; new rolling stock; bilateral foreign trade turnover; China’s GDP; loans to Belarus; sanction losses to the European Union; defence spending; robot vehicle kilometre testing; source of migration figures; historical birth rates; numbers of women of child-bearing age; pharmaceutical exports; life expectancy; environmental technologies; pension growth; and the share capital of Innopraktika, his daughter Yekaterina’s company.
All the data sets were delivered impromptu, unscripted, direct from Putin’s memory.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Simon & Schuster is a New York publisher which is now the property of ViacomCBS, National Amusements Inc., and the part-demented Sumner Redstone (Rothstein). It has long made a business of selling lies about Russia. That’s the non-fiction department.
It’s a harder sell for the fiction department to do the same. Martin Cruz Smith’s newest in his series of Russian detective novels comes up with the idea that President Vladimir Putin has ordered the murder of an oligarch challenging him for the presidency, and nearly gets away with liquidating a well-known investigative journalist at the same time. The dirty deeds done, but the girl safe holding hands with the hero under the Kremlin wall, the book’s last line ends with “the latest coronation. With a fourth term secured, Putin how reigned longer than any ruler since Stalin.”
According to Cruz Smith’s acknowledgement on the next to last page, it was his editor at Simon & Schuster who “came up with excellent ideas for the book and patiently encouraged me to take the time I needed.”
After seven weeks in print, this fabrication hasn’t made it on the New York Times best-seller list yet. It is having to compete with Simon & Schuster’s better selling fiction, seven weeks on the list and going strong at Number 8 — “The Book of Gutsy Women” by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Sergei Skripal (lead image), the central figure in the British Government’s 21-month old story of an attempted assassination by GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, is alive; not very well; and living in England.
Skripal has revealed himself in three brief telephone calls to his niece Viktoria, living with his mother Yelena in Yaroslavl. The first call took place on April 4 of this year, a year and a month after Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalised in Salisbury, following an alleged poison attack in the centre of the city on March 4, 2018. The second of Sergei’s telephone calls home was on May 9, 2019, when he left a brief recorded message on Viktoria’s telephone; May 9 is celebrated in Russia as Victory Day for the defeat of the enemy in Europe. Skripal’s third call reportedly took place on June 26, following his own and Yulia’s birthdays.
The authenticity of Skripal’s calls, each of them from a different telephone number, has been confirmed by Viktoria. They are the first evidence that he is alive; moreover, that he is well enough to testify about the alleged attack by a nerve agent the British Government has called Novichok.
The evidence of the calls also suggests that Sergei and Yulia Skripal are prevented from communicating freely with their Russian kin, and may be physically under lock and key.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
In the great game of who will sell gas to Europe, and in the American game of stopping Russia from doing so, Turkey has now declared its stake in the outcome by erecting a paper barrier across the Mediterranean Sea from the Turkish coast to the Libyan coast, and preparing to move armed forces into position to enforce it. This is both a bluff and a dare.
The paper was signed in Istanbul on November 27 between the Turkish Government and the Government of National Accord (GNA), one of the sides in the Libyan civil war. Read their memorandum of understanding and the new Turkish map of the Mediterranean here.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan followed this week with two extras. On Monday he said: “Greek Cypriots, Egypt, Greece, and Israel cannot establish a natural gas transmission line without Turkey’s consent.” Then on Tuesday: “If Libya were to make a request, we would send a sufficient number of troops. After the signing of the security agreement, there is no hurdle.”
Never mind that at the moment the GNA is losing the Libyan war. The Turkish bluff will not work against Russia, which is backing the GNA’s more powerful rival, the Libyan National Army (LNA). Nor is Turkey aiming at Russia; both have a common interest in preserving their new export pipeline for gas, TurkStream, to southern Europe through Turkey, and in beating the competition.
The Turkish dare is aimed at the US, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, challenging them to try their own navies and air forces at pushing the Turks back inside their land border; drill for gas on the seabed Turkey is claiming; and run pipelines through the barrier with which the Turks aim to stop them. For the time being, Erdogan is calculating the Americans, Greeks, Cypriots and Egyptians won’t dare to land a punch. So far he’s right.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
“We told you so”. In another case of the Russian General Staff telling the Kremlin that arming the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan puts strategic Russian interests at risk, Turkey has signed a plan to extend its control of the seabed southward across the Mediterranean to the Libyan coastline.
The Turkish counterparty, the Government of National Accord (GNA) led by Fayez al-Sarraj, is also being supplied with Turkish arms, vehicles, drones, and ordnance. Notwithstanding, the GNA doesn’t control much of the shore and even less of the hinterland of Libya. Against the GNA, the Russian military, the Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin are backing the rival Libyan faction, the Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Haftar. This isn’t new. Right now, Haftar controls much more of Libya, including coastline, than al-Sarraj.
The new Russian problem is that Turkish deployment of the S-400 missile system may be used to enforce the new Turkish territorial claim. This directly threatens Cyprus, Greece and Egypt. The first two have sought and signed agreements to become US protectorates; the third is seeking protection from both the US and Russia, a game which Cairene regimes have been playing unsuccessfully since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s time. The reason for Egypt’s strategic failure is that it is up against Israel, an enemy unlike the Turks. Israel shoots first; the Turks bluff.
Ever since the death of Yevgeny Primakov, the last civilian in Moscow to distinguish publicly in Russian strategy between adversaries who fight and adversaries who bluff, no one dares to call the Turkish bluff. The closest the Russian Foreign Ministry has come was the declaration on November 28 by Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. She said the Turks change their positions “by the hour. What could raise questions in Russia regarding the implementation of agreements signed by Turkey or what could raise questions in Turkey with regard to Russia can change within several hours.”
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
English plane spotters and bird watchers have discovered the location of the Skripals in Gloucestershire. An hour and a half’s drive north of their well-known home in Salisbury, Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been hidden inside an airbase operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) for long-range B-52 and B-2 bombers armed with nuclear weapons targeted on Russia.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
A British Ministry of Defence document, issued on March 12 but unnoticed since then, reports the ministry has searched its files and records of the blood sampling and testing for Novichok in the blood of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, but “failed to locate any information that provides the exact time that the samples were collected.” The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is the parent organization for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), the UK’s chemical warfare centre at Porton Down. Porton Down, as the laboratory is usually known, is the source of British evidence that Novichok was detected in the bloodstreams of the two Skripals.
Two officials of the DSTL laboratory testified on oath in the London Court of Protection in March of 2018, one identifying himself to the court as a “Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst” and the other, a “Porton Down Scientific Adviser”. According to the court record published on March 22, 2018, “blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent.” The presiding judge, Justice David Williams, ruled that “tests carried out by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down concluded that they had been exposed to a nerve agent.”
National Health Service (NHS) hospital manuals, English nursing sources and biochemists all say it is impossible for patient blood samples to lack precise date and time data. The Skripal samples with these data are therefore missing, while the samples analyzed by Porton Down aren’t provably from the Skripals at all.
If the Defence Ministry is telling the truth, its admission that it “failed to locate” the required blood specimen logs means there is no legal chain of custody for the evidence the British Government has publicly alleged, identifying a Russian nerve agent called Novichok, and Russian military personnel and the Kremlin as responsible for attacking the Skripals in Salisbury on March 4, 2018. Without this chain of custody, no British court can lawfully admit the prosecution’s evidence to support the government charges in the Skripal case. The Wiltshire coroner’s inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, also alleged to have resulted from a Russian Novichok attack, will be unable, lawfully, to admit the alleged evidence.
If the ministry is lying in its March 12, 2019, document, this demonstrates the collapse of the British government’s Novichok narrative into evidence of a political frame-up.
The MOD official, who signed the document as Mrs S. Gardiner, head of the ministry’s Information Rights Team, was asked to clarify her report. She has refused to reply.
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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
It was Richard Nixon (lead image, left) who famously connected his election defeat with the notion he had been victimized by other people’s boots, particularly the press. “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Nixon had lost the vote for California governor in November 1962. He was lying then; watch him do it. He went on lying — sore loser was what Nixon remained after winning the presidency twice and then losing it in mid-1974.
Boris Yeltsin (centre) has kicked the bucket, so he can’t improve on his last official speech when he managed, his incapacitation obvious, to make his resignation in favour of Vladimir Putin appear to be unforced. That lie was issued on December 31, 1999. Twenty years later, his son-in-law, Valentin Yumashev (right), is attempting to step into the old man’s shoes in a public interview with Vladimir Pozner, a journalist who has tried to show he is in the winning shoes himself by wearing brightly coloured socks. The interview was staged by the Yeltsin Centre, a state and oligarch-financed entity which Yumashev, with the remainder of the Yeltsin family, also runs.
By a second 20th anniversary coincidence, Pyotr Aven, a Yeltsin-era minister of trade and Alfa Group banker who has left Russia for the UK, has given an equally long interview in which he publicly admits to mistakes during Yeltsin’s rule – the policy mistakes of others, not the personal ones of himself. His interviewer wore sneakers without socks. Between them, fewer lies were re-issued than Yumashev and Pozner attempted. The intentions differ.
Yumashev’s message for Russians – also for the regime-changers in Washington to whom his father-in-law was deeply indebted – is that the Yeltsin family and its old factotum, Anatoly Chubais, aim to run a candidate in the Putin succession race and recover the power they think they deserve. Aven’s message is that he and the Alfa Group won’t pay for it.
But Aven is also implying something more subtle than Yumashev and Pozner disclose. It is that he and Mikhail Fridman of the Alfa Group expect the Putin succession will not be friendly towards either the oligarchs close to the Kremlin, or to the dominant privately owned businesses of the country. To them – whether they wear military, security or other uniforms Aven doesn’t hint — Aven is saying the Alfa Group asks either to be bought out, or if the new Kremlin won’t do that, to be allowed to live and let live.
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