by Jean-Marc Bovy, Geneva
  @bears_with

Do you remember Sergei Skripal, that double agent poisoned in Great Britain, they said, by the Russian secret services? What has become of them, Sergei and his daughter Yulia, since they survived one of the most violent poisons that there are?  Why don’t we see them any longer? And there are other troublesome questions which only a great adventurer of investigating in troubled waters could tackle.

John Helmer, Australian citizen, has been an independent press correspondent in Moscow for almost thirty years. Returned to the country, he continues to animate a site that deserves its name, Dances with Bears. His strong columns, well-documented on topics of politics, society and economics, are illustrated by drawings and humorous collages by his own hand.

Helmer knows how to connect his topical comments to the entire historical past of Russia by placing them back in a global geopolitical context. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which does not bother with Cartesian logic, he cultivates originality, even a certain entertaining wit,  which  doesn’t fear contradicting itself when reality itself pushes him to contradictory conclusions.  

Helmer is the author of Skripal in Prison published in 2020, two years after the mysterious poisoning of double agent Skripal and of his daughter Yulia on the bench of a Salisbury town park. Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer convicted of having sold his services to the MI6, lived in England after Russia had exchanged him for its own agents captured by the Anglo-American services. The poison in question has been identified as a nerve agent of Russian origin called Novichok; despite its formidable toxicity, however, it had not sent its victims to the other world.

Even before an investigation could be conducted on the circumstances of this failed attack, Prime Minister Theresa May had pointed the finger at Russia by asserting “it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and despicable act” against Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The prosecution has raised an international scandal which led to the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats by Great Britain and many other Western countries.

Left:  Prime Minister Theresa May who made her accusation against Russia in the House of Commons on March 14, 2018; here is the text of her speech.  Right: headline and lede from The Guardian, March 27, 2018.

Seven years have passed since the attempted Salisbury murder and we are still waiting for the irrefutable evidence to transform the “highly likely” culpability attributed to Russia in this abortive poisoning into certainty. 

In a second work on the Skripal case published at the beginning of this year, John Helmer applies himself with the talent of a detective to exposing the smokescreen that the British authorities and their system of justice have created to cover their tracks and prevent light from being shed on what can only be called the Salisbury mystery.

The title chosen for his investigation speaks for itself: Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the world.

To reach the conclusion that perfidious Albion is behind the crime he has accused Russia of committing, Helmer presents a series of facts and arguments which only seasoned lawyers and forensic experts can argue in opposition. So far, Helmer’s incendiary book has not provoked any reaction from our media which had made so much noise at the time of the events in 2018.

It’s a safe bet that silence will continue to reign over the Skripal Affair before it is finally forgotten. The fate of Sergei Skripal and his daughter continues to be ignored. Under the pretext that they needed to be protected from further attacks by Russia, they were sequestered by the British justice system and have shown no further sign of life for seven years. In the land of Habeas Corpus, it has become possible to incarcerate the victims of a crime and keep them in secret so that they cannot come forward to testify about their experiences, which could contradict the official version of events.

Helmer’s columns and numerous books focus primarily on Russia and its relations with the outside world. This should not, however, be interpreted as a pro-Russian bias. In The Man Who Knew Too Much About Russia, he himself recounts how he suffered intimidation from the Soviet and Russian secret services, from which he is happy to have emerged alive. Regarding the nature of the regime in Russia, he puts the president’s allegedly autocratic power into perspective, as Putin plays at best the role of an arbiter, often manipulated, within an all-powerful oligarchy.

During his decades in Moscow, in parallel with his work as an investigative journalist, Helmer  has been a consultant in the mining sector, particularly in the field of rare and precious metals. This knowledge of the mining sector gives him a very deep insight—one could not say it more aptly — into current geopolitics. This has recently been enriched with a new dimension that, in the eyes of a leader like Trump, is crucial: the geopolitics of metals and rare earths has become just as relevant today as the geopolitics of pipelines.

Witness this excerpt from a recent column in Dances with Bears: “Someone has convinced President Donald Trump of two simple ideas.  The first is that because the US auto, aerospace, and artificial intelligence industries are heavily dependent for their supplies of lithium, titanium,  and other rare earth minerals (REM) on two enemy states, China and Russia, they should be replaced as quickly as possible by a friendly source.  The second idea is that, in order to break this dependency, the cheapest solution is to take over the Ukrainian sources of these minerals and metals at zero cost of acquisition — zero cost because the Ukraine can be pressed to hand over its sources as payback for the US financing of the war against Russia. The someone who convinced Trump of these two ideas was Elon Musk.”

Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

In Helmer’s eyes, this outcome is a hustle and a plan for simpletons.  “How to make losing the war in the Ukraine look like a win – this is President Donald Trump’s purpose in presenting himself and his administration as in favour of peace and of cashback to the United States…This is a hustle – it is an attempt by a combination of threats and rewards to convert a political and military defeat into a ready money profit;  call the process peacemaking, Trump himself the peacemaker, and the outcome peace.”  

Russia continues to be at war with the United States on the Ukrainian front and will under no circumstances allow the Americans, or the Kiev regime they effectively support, to get their hands on Ukraine’s rare earths. The bulk of these coveted resources is located on the Russian side of the front, with a small portion on the Ukrainian side near the firing line. Peace is not a commodity to be bargained away.

[*] This essay has been published in the March 16, 2025, edition of Antipresse, which is based in Geneva and directed by Slobodan Despot. The author, Jean-Marc Bovy, is Swiss; he was  educated at the University of Geneva and Lomonosov University in Moscow. He has been an interpreter in Russian and French, an international commodity trader, and business consultant at the Centre Patronal in Lausanne. He is a regular analyst of Russian affairs in Antipresse. For the original in French, read here.  To follow the podcasts of Slobodan Despot, click.   

by Editor - Sunday, March 16th, 2025