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Dances with Bears
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[l] at 9/18/19 1:11am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Sergei Frank (lead image, right) is being removed from control of Sovcomflot, the Russian state tanker company and one of the largest oil and gas transporters in the world.  Frank is the only senior Russian state official to have been judged by the British courts to be dishonest and vindictive […]

[Category: Maritime, Russian Politics]

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[l] at 9/17/19 12:10am
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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/16/19 12:48am
  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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/13/19 2:00am
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, […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/10/19 1:22am
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 […]

[Category: DwB, Greece-Russia]

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[l] at 9/9/19 3:03am
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, […]

[Category: Interviews]

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[l] at 9/9/19 1:28am
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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/9/19 12:36am
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, […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 8/23/19 2:07am
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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 8/2/19 3:08am
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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 8/2/19 12:38am
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 […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 7/29/19 12:36am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Under cover of its Russian S-400 air defence batteries, and ignoring US and European sanctions, Turkey is going on the offensive at sea, surrounding Cyprus, and by land, launching a weapon against the European Union against which there is no defence: a Turkish cannon firing 150,000 people at Europe’s borders […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 7/24/19 12:14am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It appears that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his officials may have lied twice – the first time in February to deny they had discussed mediation in the Kashmir conflict with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; and the second time this week to deny that Modi discussed US mediation […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 7/23/19 1:03am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The new Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Ukraine, elected on Sunday, will have an overwhelming national mandate to negotiate peace terms to end the five-year civil war. Sluha Narodu (“Servant of the People”), the party of President Volodymyr Zelensky, having won almost 43% of the votes countrywide, will now command […]

[Category: DwB, Ukraine]

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[l] at 7/22/19 12:43am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A new documentary film by Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials;  suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;  and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt […]

[Category: MH17, Ukraine]

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[l] at 7/22/19 12:43am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A new documentary film by Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials;  suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;  and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt […]

[Category: MH17, Ukraine]

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[l] at 7/19/19 12:50am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with What can Foreign Affairs, bimonthly tribune of the Council of Foreign Affairs in New York, be referring to when it reported on the government for which “in worldview and practice, it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, constantly gaslighting itself. In administration, it constituted a crusade […]

[Category: Books, DwB]

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[l] at 7/15/19 2:34am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with If Russian money talks,  there can be no doubt it is telling President Vladimir Putin to give Russia’s relationship with Turkey a priority comparable, almost, with China and India. The  message eliminates Greece from the Kremlin’s consideration; it also diminishes Cyprus. But does this mean there is a powerful Turkish […]

[Category: DwB, Greece-Russia]

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[l] at 7/12/19 1:56am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The New York State Supreme Court has ruled to dismiss Leonid Lebedev’s (lead image, right) five-year case against Victor Vekselberg (first left) and Len Blavatnik (second left) for a 15% share of their £13.8 billion sale of the TNK-BP oil company to Rosneft in 2013.    Lebedev has been suing for […]

[Category: DwB, Oligarchs]

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[l] at 7/11/19 12:39am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Five years of civil war have convinced most Ukrainian voters to vote for peace by negotiation and compromise with the regional governments of Donetsk and Lugansk, and with Moscow. Support for continuing the war until the eastern regions capitulate has now shrunk to the western region of Ukraine around Lviv, […]

[Category: Ukraine]

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[l] at 7/8/19 1:59am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The US State Department, the Republican Party Institute and Igor Kolomoisky can’t all be wrong about what the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian voters is thinking – that there is a civil war in the Ukraine which cannot be won by US arms,  money, and putsches in Kiev. The question to […]

[Category: Ukraine]

As of 9/18/19 9:53am. Last new 9/17/19 12:51am.

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