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Dances with Bears
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[l] at 11/6/19 5:11am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Under threat of formal investigation for breaking the law and lying to the press, David Ridley (lead image), the English county coroner in charge of investigating the alleged Novichok poisoning death of Dawn Sturgess, has announced a new inquest hearing. This week through the coroner’s office in Salisbury, a new […]

[Category: DwB, Skripal]

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[l] at 11/5/19 12:03am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Not everything that glisters is gold, Shakespeare wrote as a warning about the seeming value of precious metal. Nor plisters is platinum. The shine has been off for years now because the price of platinum has fallen steadily, and because the risks of mining it in South Africa have accelerated […]

[Category: DwB, Precious Metals]

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[l] at 10/30/19 1:25am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In our last episode, Denis Diderot, the French philosopher in Paris, had sold his library to the Empress Catherine in St. Petersburg. For his bonus, he had received a ticket to meet and talk to Catherine directly. At their first meeting at a masked ball in the Winter Palace, Diderot […]

[Category: Oligarchs]

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[l] at 10/25/19 12:54am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It doesn’t suit any of the sides in the US presidential campaign to acknowledge that the terms President Vladimir Putin agreed this week for the Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Syria to become permanent are not those which Russia’s Defence Ministry, General Staff, Foreign Ministry and Foreign Intelligence Service […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/24/19 12:33am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both born under the sign of Libra. The zodiac directs them, on the positive side, to be cooperative and diplomatic; on the negative side, to be indecisive and vacillating. For likes, Librans click most on harmony and balance. October 21 was […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/23/19 1:18am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with After one of the longest, bitterest negotiations ever held between President Vladimir Putin and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov forced the Turks into an agreement for a Turkish military enclave inside Syrian territory between Tal Abiad and Ras Al-Ain (Sari Kani). […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/22/19 1:04am
By Gary Busch, London* The roots of the Syrian Civil War start with conflicts over who controls Syria’s energy supplies. The war continues, especially in the Kurdish areas of the north, in a fight over water which has been growing desperately scarcer for everybody – Syrians, Kurds, Turks, Iraqis. Achieving a final conclusion to the […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/18/19 1:10am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hoping that his meeting with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for next Tuesday in Sochi, will give him the same battlefield advantages on Syrian territory which Putin conceded in their Idlib Agreement of last September. By fixing the Putin negotiation at the limit of the […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/17/19 1:19am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union is John Heathershaw’s métier. Heathershaw is a professor at the University of Exeter where he specializes in studying and teaching “conflict, security and development in authoritarian political environments, especially in post-Soviet Central Asia.”  Recently, he took exception to my critical reviews of books on […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/17/19 1:19am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union is John Heathershaw’s métier. Heathershaw is a professor at the University of Exeter where he specializes in studying and teaching “conflict, security and development in authoritarian political environments, especially in post-Soviet Central Asia.”  Recently, he took exception to my critical reviews of books on […]

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/16/19 12:29am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Boris Dubrovsky (lead images), President Vladimir Putin’s governor of Chelyabinsk between 2014 and March 19, 2019, has long been at risk of lung disease, and he is now reported to be in a Swiss clinic for treatment. His prognosis is uncertain. More certain it is that Dubrovsky will not be […]

[Category: DwB, Oligarchs, Steel]

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[l] at 10/15/19 12:36am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Dominic Cummings, presently a powerful and wealthy 47-year old special advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was hard at work in Moscow and Samara for three years, between 1994 and 1997. He has acknowledged himself that “I worked in Russia 1994-7 on various projects.” This was no news to […]

[Category: DwB, Media]

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[l] at 10/14/19 3:41am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Government’s narrative that a Kremlin-ordered assassination plot against a former GRU agent, Sergei Skripal, in March of 2018 also caused the death of a woman, Dawn Sturgess,  three months later,  has collapsed for lack of evidence admissible in court.   After nineteen months of investigations by hundreds of […]

[Category: Skripal]

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[l] at 10/7/19 11:47pm
By Eric Zuesse*   The Netherlands Government is resisting an effort by the families of the Dutch victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 to find out why,  on July 17, 2014 – the day Flight MH17 was shot down when over the eastern Ukrainian civil war zone — this passenger aircraft had been guided by […]

[Category: MH17]

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[l] at 10/7/19 12:03am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Joe Biden’s campaign for president, as well as his defence against charges of corrupt influence peddling and political collusion in the Ukraine, are being promoted in Washington by the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk (lead image, right) through the New York lobbyist, candidate adviser and pollster, Douglas Schoen (left). This follows […]

[Category: Oligarchs, Ukraine]

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[l] at 10/3/19 5:50am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Robert Service (lead images) commits the pathetic fallacy over and over. It isn’t that his fallacies are pathetic, and so deserve to be pitied. It is that Service takes money for writing histories, purporting to be about Russia, its revolutionary leaders, and now its current leader, by projecting his own […]

[Category: Books]

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[l] at 9/30/19 12:26am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the cartoon,  Mighty Mouse was always on the defensive, repelling attacks from wicked aggressors, cats, for example, or dogs.   When the cartoon first began in 1942, the words of the theme song were also defensive:  “Mr. Trouble never hangs around, When he hears this mighty sound: ‘Here I come […]

[Category: Oligarchs]

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[l] at 9/23/19 5:31am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Among Russian oligarchs, Alexei Mordashov (lead image, centre) holds two records. One is for empty promises: he has never told the whole truth in public or when he has visited President Vladimir Putin (right) for private conversations about his business plans and the Russian state interest. Mordashov’s other record is […]

[Category: DwB, Oligarchs]

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[l] at 9/23/19 12:47am
By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Whoaaa Neddy! Another hack has gotten out of the stable of American historians of Russia. Actually, this one, Eleonory Gilburd, is a Russian-born, US educated and employed hack of the Soviet Jewish emigration like Keith Gessen, Masha Gessen  and Yury Slezkine. Russian exiles with axes to grind.    They have […]

[Category: DwB]

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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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