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[l] at 11/5/24 1:34am
by John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with The British Government’s narrative that Russian military agents, on orders from President Vladimir Putin, used Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018 continues to collapse. A secret chemical warfare agent revealed last week that two tests for Novichok, using special machines provided by the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, failed to confirm []

[Category: DwB, Skripal]

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[l] at 11/5/24 1:10am
by John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with For more than two months now, President Vladimir Putin’s orders to the General Staff have been to shorten the range of the electric war campaign to the area east of Kiev and the Dnieper River, and west of the advancing line of Russian forces. The General Staff have responded by limiting []

[Category: DwB, Ukraine]

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[l] at 11/5/24 12:36am
by John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with It’s a pity when a 760-page history of the Russian leadership’s thinking during the Cold War period, 1945 to 2022, earns consignment to the waste bin within the first nineteen pages, and in just three sentences. This ratio of toxicity to prolixity – 1 to 40 is exceptional, although the []

[Category: DwB, US-Russia]

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[l] at 11/2/24 1:29am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image) unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way []

[Category: Skripal]

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[l] at 10/26/24 3:25am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Ragpicking is a serious women’s business, extracting value from rubbish. Cheerleading is the unserious business of girls waving pompoms at football games. There are those who claim the Kazan Declaration is today’s equivalent of the Bretton Woods Final Act (1944) and Bandung Declaration (1955),  or a “a huge manifesto”,    or “victory []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/25/24 2:52am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Government’s investigation of the alleged Novichok attacks against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which they survived, and Dawn Sturgess, who died, has now run for six and half years. The public presentation of evidence and witnesses has completed its first week; the second week of hearings will begin next Monday, []

[Category: Skripal]

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[l] at 10/23/24 1:54am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A two-month delay in Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian electricity infrastructure west of the Dnieper River and secret talks on end-of-war terms by the Kremlin go-between Vladimir Medinsky (lead image, right) produced two signals from Kiev on Monday – one an offer by Vladimir Zelensky to reciprocate with a limit on []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/21/24 12:56am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was murdered on October 20, 2011, and to mark the thirteenth anniversary of his death, the Russian Foreign Ministry received Qaddafi’s daughter, Aisha Qaddafi, in Moscow on Friday. This is the first open meeting in Russia between high-ranking Russian officials and the Qaddafi family. The political []

[Category: DwB, Israel, Mideast]

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[l] at 10/18/24 1:38am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with “The winners of the war are the Russian General Staff. Everyone in Russia understands that the Russian Army is winning and will win this war…I believe Gilbert is wrong on the history of the negotiations that have gone on since before this war began… It’s [Russian] military protection that guarantees [Ukrainian] []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/16/24 1:17am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with According to the Russian Constitution amendments adopted in 2020,  Vladimir Putin can run for re-election in 2030 and win another term until 2036, when he will be 84. The contest over the presidential succession may thus be postponed for another decade. Or else it is under way already. That’s one of []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/15/24 1:37am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the first day of public hearings directed by retired judge Anthony Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley (lead image) – the evidence compiled over six years by the police, secret services, CCTV records, and witnesses is that Novichok, identified as one of the world’s fastest acting nerve poisons, was []

[Category: Skripal]

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[l] at 10/11/24 4:37am
by John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with The timetable for public hearings has been announced by the British government and its judge, Lord Anthony Hughes, to repeat the official allegations of Novichok attacks by Russian agents against Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, then Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018. The first hearing will open on next []

[Category: Skripal]

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[l] at 10/11/24 2:13am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/9/24 2:28am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Russian history of end-of-war negotiations for the capitulation of Germany and for the World War II peace settlement requires it to be understood now: it was the Red Army’s defeat of the enemy on the battlefield all the way to Berlin which preceded and which was the precondition for the []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/8/24 1:29am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Just days before Iran and Arab forces launched their October 1 operation to expose Israel’s military vulnerabilities, four Palestinian Americans launched the most serious threat to Israel’s survival in the economic war that is under way in parallel. On September 24 they filed an 89-page brief in a Florida state court []

[Category: Israel]

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[l] at 10/4/24 2:19am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Pokrovsk, in the northwestern corner of Donetsk region, is almost a Russian city again. Established as a minor Russian rail junction in 1880, it was badly damaged by the Italians and Germans who captured the city between 1941 and 1943, killing more than 8,000 Red Army defenders, 5,000 residents, and all []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 10/2/24 1:11am
By Gilbert Doctorow in Brussels*  @bears_with As a rule, on these pages I (Gilbert Doctorow, lead image) do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception.  A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/30/24 2:04am
by John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with “The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twistof 1838 who began the popularity of combining law []

[Category: DwB, Skripal]

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[l] at 9/30/24 1:07am
by Slobodan Despot, Montreux, and John Helmer, Moscow@bears_with A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov (akaPaul Du Rove, lead imagelower right)) has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron (upper right) by their common friend, Xavier Niel (upper left), a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/29/24 3:33am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Roman, Persian, Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper. Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to []

[Category: DwB]

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[l] at 9/27/24 2:01am
by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019. At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the []

[Category: DwB]

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