By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was Aristophanes who said you can’t teach a crab to walk straight. Lenin wasn’t talking about crabs when he recommended taking one step forward, two steps back.

This summer, when President Vladimir Putin last talked to Gennady Timchenko about his family’s crab business, he said he was revising the old Lenin tract. Two steps sideways, and one step forward, Putin advised.  By sideways he meant that investigations under way in April by the General Prosecutor’s office, the Kremlin Control Directorate, and the Accounting Chamber of the Russian Fishing Company, controlled by Timchenko’s son-in-law Gleb Frank, have been called off. The federal minister in charge, Yury Trutnev, has also been advised to move sideways until after the first government auction of crab quotas start on October 7.

On that day, Rosrybolovtsvo (Rosryb), the federal Russian Fishery Agency, which is a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. will start auctioning catch quotas for 15-year terms in 41 lots of 1,000 tonnes each; the estimated state price will be about Rb125 billion ($1.9 billion). Bidding for the fareast crab quotas will run from October 7 to 11; the northern Barents Sea crab auction will take place on October 14-15; the official results will then be issued by Rosryb and contracts with the winning companies should be signed on October 28.

The Russian Fishing Company (RRPC) is expected to take at least a third of the offer, probably more since lack of cash and state bank financing to meet Rosryb’s terms prevent industry rivals from bidding. An additional cost requirement for the winning bidders is that they must commit to building new crabbing vessels at local shipyards. In support of its quota bid, RRPC is reported to have committed to paying $500 million for 22 vessels.

“All attempts at investigating or allowing competition in the crab business are now dead,” an industry source said last week. “This is now the fashion. Timchenko got the blessing from Putin.” (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 16th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday afternoon in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for three hours, and then publicly endorsed him for re-election. Putin’s endorsement was unconditional: he could have warned against Netanyahu’s election pledge, revealed last week, to annex the West Bank of Palestine, but he didn’t. Putin could have warned against Israeli air force and missile strikes on targets in Syria, but he didn’t. “We have absolutely identical positions,” Putin declared, according to the official Kremlin record. Putin was speaking only for himself.    

That was made plain to Netanyahu during the Sochi session by the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Kremlin publication,   however, cut them out of the photographic record and official communiqué, as if they weren’t there at all. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 15th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In high state politics there’s a difference between the morons and the psychopaths – between Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau on the one hand, John Bolton and Chrystia Freeland on the other. The  difference is in the ability to count the fingers on one hand. 

Bolton has been removed because, notwithstanding Trump’s mental disabilities and small hands, the President can still do arithmetic. The current US voter polls show he is running a negative approval rating of 10 points, 54% to 44%; there has been a significant decline since July.    Trump’s  domestic policy approval is positive, however. He is being pulled down by disapproval of his foreign policy, and by American voters’ fear that the future will be worse.   Bolton is the finger on Trump’s hand which must be removed for the president to count on re-election.

Compared to Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson in the UK, Emmanuel Macron in France, or Angela Merkel in Germany, Vladimir Putin is a rock of stability, neurologically and arithmetically speaking,  too. His approval rating, last measured by the Levada Centre in August, was trending downwards, but still a positive 36 points, 67% to 31%.  The Moscow city duma and regional gubernatorial elections of last Sunday confirm what midterm and local elections usually show everywhere – voter discontent and the readiness to signal it as loudly as possible. In my Moscow district, for example, a middle-class one, voter turnout was double the citywide average, 44% to 22%; the winning candidate was from the Communist Party. This is not the regime-change threat reported in the Anglo-American media.

In the campaign for next month’s Canadian election, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is as much of a liability, and for the same reason, as Bolton was for Trump. For Trudeau to survive in power, it is the French voters of Quebec backing him, not the Ukrainian voters who support Freeland,  who will be decisive. Freeland’s last desperate measure, to encourage the Canadian press to report the threat of Russian interference in the Canadian election, is going to fail, not because it’s false, but because Canadian voters, starting in her home province of Ontario, regard her as a threat to their future. (more…)

by Editor - Friday, September 13th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russia has been warning Cyprus (lead image, left) for months to beware the risks and consequences of offering its offshore oil and gas to US companies in exchange for promises of a US military protectorate against Turkish invasion. So far the American response (lead image, centre – Secretary of State Michael Pompeo) has been to require Cyprus to block Russian Navy access to its ports; expel Russian capital from its banks; and put a stop to what Washington calls pro-Russian journalism in the Greek-language press. For details of this scheme, read this. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has denounced the Washington plan as an “artificial choice” and also a “gross violation” of Cyprus’s internal affairs. But so far the Russians have joined the Americans in accepting that what the Turks believe to be theirs is theirs, and that what the Cypriots (and Greeks) regard as theirs is negotiable.

For the first time, however, Cypriot and Greek military officers and experts have joined to plan  Cypriot military tactics against Turkey’s attempt at taking over the Cyprus offshore seabed and at fresh Turkish troop landings on the island. Not since the Cypriots fought a successful guerrilla war against the British for independence in the 1950s, and then in 1974 fought the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island has a Cypriot military approach appeared.  Self-defence by the Cypriots – without alignment with Americans or Russians, and without backing from Athens — is unprecedented. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Cover yourself. When it’s raining, you can’t borrow somebody else’s umbrella for shelter.

In September 1938, the umbrella of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became the symbol of his foolishness in accepting Adolph Hitler’s terms for the takeover of the Sudetenland, then Czechoslovakia,  as “peace for our time” (lead image, left), then telling the British to “go home and get a nice quiet sleep”.  

The US umbrella which Nikos Anastasiades, President of Cyprus, and Kyriacos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, have applied to borrow, to protect themselves from the terms dictated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan(lead image, right)  isn’t yet as infamous. It’s already just as futile.  For Cypriot and Greek officials to pretend to such folly is a treason before their own people.    (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs—this is still Goebbels-type but  stretched out and product-diversified  to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti’s method.

His new book on the business of Russian crime isn’t about business at all. There’s not a single item from a balance-sheet, cashflow analysis, asset trace, or financial indictment in Galeotti’s effort to exaggerate  Russian criminals to mean Russian people, all of them. 

The Russians are also the unique criminals of our world, he thinks  – no other nation on earth matches them for their criminality. So for the protection of the rest of the innocent world, and to protect the uncriminalized from being Russianized, the Russian state, that’s the “super-mafia” of Galeotti’s targeting, should be destroyed by warfare. And since Galeotti repeats the slang of the Russian streets himself to rub in his conclusion that “mainstream society” – that’s everybody –“ reflect[s] a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life”, he means that Russians deserve  more than their mouths washed out.  Galeotti is a mercenary; his book a weapon — a stun-gun for the naive,   an improvised explosive device for the unguarded, a neutron bomb for the sceptical.   Means, motive, opportunity for a hate crime in the service of a war crime. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Mother Nature has arranged short life spans for rabbits, like journalists.

Rabbits have the advantage — an extra digestive cycle for foodstuffs which don’t properly give up their nutrients on the first pass-through. In the autumn, when grass and other tender plant stems give way to dry straw and bark, this comes in handy, rabbit-wise.  They cycle the stuff through their cecum – a pouch between their intestines — excrete it in lumps, and eat it for re-digestion.  The lumps are called cecotropes. You don’t need to be a veterinarian or aborigine to tell the difference between cecotropes and shit. You can tell by looking at them. Cecotropes are soft and lumpy; shit is hard and pellet-sized.

In the internet media, cecotropes are called tweets. Retweeting is the human equivalent of eating shit. But in the human anatomy, there’s no cecum, just an appendix which is quite useless unless it gets inflamed. If you lack a cecum, eating shit can cause appendicitis,  and that can lead to brain death. Most journalists eat shit without realizing the terminal damage they’ve done; being dead,  their brains are as useless as their appendixes. Readers of brain-dead journalism can tell by looking at it – is it soft and lumpy, or hard and pellet-sized?

Regular exercises are required for telling the difference between the two. Welcome back.

by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2019
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Friday, August 23rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Aestivation in August is something to be shared with the African lungfish, alfalfa weevils and salamanders. For them, in the hottest season of the year it’s obligatory to conserve energy and retain water in the body for unluckily long periods. If they don’t wish to die, they must be taught to lower their metabolic rates. This is why August is a holiday month in civilized Europe, including Russia.

The organ most resistant to slowing down is the one which must keep up practicing what it does best; otherwise it loses its capacity to function altogether. The fingers of pianists, for example, must never stop practicing the piano, however hot August gets. The fingers of writers are the same. Even the lady bug and the cane toad usually handle the mortal risk of August aestivation better than people can. In August beasts worry about plain death.  People worry about living death; that’s when the brain slows down to the point of realizing that the fingers and other things work with embarrassing clumsiness, or not at all. (This isn’t about erectile dysfunction; the children in the audience may stay on the page and read on.) (more…)

by Editor - Friday, August 2nd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This month’s escalation of US and British threats to Iran’s oil export shipping and maritime defences in the Persian Gulf is to be matched with Russian assistance to the Iran Navy and to shore batteries of air defence missiles, as well as the 300-kilometre range Russian Kalibr missile, a US Navy ship-killer.

The Kalibr, according to US assessments, “skims just above the sea, making it difficult to detect at a distance, before leaping up to three times the speed of sound on the terminal approach—offering a challenging target for missile-defense systems. The Kalibr can be fired not only from underwater by submarines, but also by relatively small and cheap corvettes.”

Iran, according to its experts, has its own anti-shipping missiles and drones deployed along the Iranian coastline, on the sea surface and on board submarines, concentrating at the Strait of Hormuz.   What the Iranian arms may lack in speed, range and electronic capabilities, the introduction of Russian electronic counter-measures, which Russians sources say has begun, will assist by jamming or spoofing US tracking equipment.

The result has already been signalled by the British, German and French governments in their response to Trump Administration requests for a multinational naval convoy operation in the Persian Gulf, and also in response to Iranian warnings. At sea, Iranian naval commanders have already deterred the British with the warning: “don’t put your life in danger.” The response of the Europeans is the one from Germany’s Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister,  Olaf Scholz: “We must prevent an escalation that could end in a much bigger conflict. So I think that this [naval operation] is not the best idea.”

The British naval response has been to add a warship in the Gulf, the destroyer HMS Duncan.  But this has failed to add confidence to shippers. On July 30 British Petroleum’s (BP) chief financial officer Brian Gilvary rejected the efficacy of naval convoys to safeguard BP’s vessels. The company, he declared, “has no current plans to take any of its own vessels through the strait, adding that BP is shipping oil out of the region using chartered tankers.”   According to Gilvary, “we will continue to make shipments through there but you won’t see any BP-flagged tankers going through in the short term.”  In other words, it’s up to others to run their own risks of seizure or destruction. But for them the market has already decided by raising the cost of premiums that independent charterers should be deterred.  For the foreseeable future marine underwriters are requiring them to negotiate terms according to the specifics of the voyages proposed.  (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, August 1st, 2019
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