By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The NATO intelligence publicity department known as Bellingcat has just produced new NATO-sourced evidence of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game which the navies and air forces of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and the US played against Russian forces in the Baltic Sea off Bornhom Island in the week before the detonation of explosives on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September 26.

Cat and mouse is also the game the NATO propaganda agencies are now playing.  

The aim of the intelligence, published last week by the quasi-state German media platform called T-Online,  and in the Danish offshoot of Bellingcat known as Oliver Alexander,  is to accuse the Russian Navy of the pipeline attack, using a mini-submarine and deep-sea divers. This is based on NATO and US identification and tracking of a six-vessel Russian flotilla several days before the explosions – an intelligence vessel, a deep-sea operations vessel, two tugs, and heavily armed anti-ship and anti-submarine frigate and corvette.

“It was precisely such mini-submarines that could have placed the explosive charges attaching it to the pipelines, experts suspected from the very start,” T-Online claims, using the hypothetical followed by a conditional plus three more hypotheticals.

“If it was confirmed that the SS-750 was at the scene, the Russian Navy would probably be the prime suspect from then on. ‘It would make absolute sense to use something like the AS-26 for such an attack,” Danish corvette captain and military analyst Johannes Riber told T-Online about this matter. ‘That would be the most plausible explanation so far for what happened to the Nord Stream pipeline.’” T-Online concluded: “In official statements, the activities of the Russian navy in the days before the attacks have so far played no role. Neither the German, Danish or Swedish investigators, nor NATO or the armed forces of the Baltic Sea states wanted to comment on them when asked by T-Online. Thus, the criminal case remains unsolved for the time being, but a chain of evidence has been added. It does not point to the USA or Ukraine. Some tracks now are leading to Moscow.”

Riber, the Danish navy source, has made a career chain of working in NATO staffs, as well as under US commands in Iraq and Bahrain.  In addition, T-Online claims its evidence has come from US satellite imagery and “sources in the security community”.

In parallel publication under his own name, Alexander has been less forensically direct, more circumstantial. The Russian vessels were “possibly… in close proximity to the Nord Stream sabotage site”.  This is circumstantial guilt by geographical association; Alexander camouflages it by a disclaimer: “In conclusion, OSINT [Open Source Intelligence] alone cannot solve the mystery of the Nord Stream sabotage or what these vessels were doing on September 21st-23rd, a few days before the explosions. It does however seem likely that the unusual events on these dates are somehow a key part of the Nord Stream sabotage mystery.”

The sourcing for Alexander’s claims is “an intelligence source [who] had told [T-Online] the names of six Russian naval vessels that were reportedly spotted in the vicinity of the Nord Stream sabotage site. With this information, I have spent the past week collecting and analyzing any open source information I could find in order to try to corroborate as much of their information as possible.”   

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by Editor - Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The British Government (lead image, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak) has decided that in public hearings to confirm that Russian-made, Russian-delivered Novichok killed Dawn Sturgess in mid-2018 – after failing to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal weeks earlier – nothing can be said or revealed without being subject to an immediate veto by the police, the MI6 spy agency, and other UK officials.

The veto will cover police records; closed-circuit television (CCTV) films; laboratory reports by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; Salisbury District Hospital patient admission and clinical test results; witness testimony; coroner’s cremation forms – in fact, everything which may expose, not what really happened to the Skripals and to Sturgess, but what didn’t happen to them which the British Government insists it did.

That evidence is what is called “sensitive information” in the state inquiry into the cause of Sturgess’s death which held a new courtroom session in London on Friday.   

Lord Anthony Hughes, the retired judge appointed to run the proceeding, acknowledged this month that “there is a risk that sensitive information might be disclosed, inadvertently or otherwise, during the course of the open preliminary hearings.” Accordingly, he has announced, that “there will be two video links to afford those not present in the hearing room with access to the hearing – a ‘live link’ and a ‘delayed link’, which will be delayed by 5 minutes.  The public and media attending the hearing remotely will do so by means of the delayed link.”  

In the 5-minute delay, Hughes has decided, “in the event that sensitive information is disclosed in the course of an open hearing whilst these measures are in place or a Core Participant informs the Chair that he considers that sensitive information may have been disclosed, the Chair will consider taking the following steps (if necessary by receiving submissions in closed session): a. an immediate termination of the delayed link; b. making a restriction order to prohibit the publication of the sensitive information; c. ensuring that when the delayed link feed is resumed, the sensitive information (including any submissions concerning any information which a Core Participant considers may be sensitive information) is not broadcast.”

The inquiry has already decided that the “core participants” include the Sturgess family, several branches of the British police, the Home Office representing the intelligence agencies and Porton Down, the Wiltshire Council, and the regional ambulance service which responded to emergency calls for the Skripals on March 4, 2018, and for Sturgess on June 30.   

Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been designated core participants, but their lawyer, Adam Chapman, has refused to confirm that the Skripals have appointed him to represent them or that they are still alive.  Without explanation Chapman was absent from the latest court hearing last Friday.

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by Editor - Monday, March 27th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It takes time for politicians to understand.

When the Obama Administration pulled their Kiev putsch of February 21, 2014, they, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and their British and French counterparts understood they were in for a long war. Merkel has admitted as much;  the British and French have lost power and been replaced by successors impatient to win propaganda victories if they can — and not lose on the battlefield too quickly if they cannot.   

By December of 2021, US officials believed they were almost ready to expand their war, recover Crimea and the Donbass, and inflict such a battlefield defeat on Russian forces as to trigger chaos, then regime change in Moscow. This calculation is why the US and NATO dismissed negotiations on the terms of the small pact, the Minsk accords of 2015, and then the larger pact for Europe of December 2021  – an idea the Russians called indivisible sovereignty, the Americans reciprocal security, the Europeans non-aggression.

A quick preemptive defence and preventative war was an idea of President Vladimir Putin’s. It was neutralized in the Kiev operation during the first month of the campaign last year. The aim then was not to capture the city, but to trigger Ukrainian regime change, then negotiations. By the time the Istanbul talks began,  the Zelensky group remained intact, and the long war commenced. This had been the anticipation of the Russian General Staff then. It still is.

Long means years.

Long enough in the US calculation for President Joseph Biden not to die before his re-election in November 2024. This is the only war casualty the US cares about for the foreseeable future; it explains why there is, and can be, no American anti-war movement of any consequence.  So far, so good – Biden’s death has been averted at a cost of at least 250,000 Ukrainian combat and civilian deaths, plus Poles, Germans, French, British et alia. But these numbers don’t count in Washington because Biden is currently beating every potential Democratic or Republican Party presidential candidate in next year’s election.  Polled about this, US voters who are negative towards Biden regard his conduct of the war against Russia in the Ukraine more positively, less negatively than any of his other policies.

This is not only curtains for anti-war voter mobilization in the US. It  makes recent statements   by Donald Trump that if elected, he will stop the war “no longer than in one  day” a desperate, cynical bid, not for American votes, but for Kremlin support to his candidacy.  

The Russian General Staff counts the length of the war as the time they plan to spend destroying all Ukrainian force capabilities east of the Dnieper River, and establish a demilitarized zone west of the new Russian border of the Donbass so deep as to put NATO artillery and other forms of attack out of range. Long enough also to destroy every new NATO weapon system promised, transported, or deployed from the US and NATO to Ukrainian territory.

The Chinese government and President Xi Jinping count the length of this war as even longer. They see the acceleration of US economic warfare and sanctions against them; new force deployments around China’s borders; and the expansion of US gun platforms like Japan, South Korea, and Australia will follow the pattern already set against Russia. Only by Russia’s victory on the field and the retreat of the NATO side to the underground bunkers of Lvov can China be secure for Xi’s Central Military Commission, who also need time to practice, plan, test, plan again.

All of this was very well understood in the talks between the Xi and Putin and their staffs in Moscow last week. The talks were a success because neither side is in a hurry now and said so. Negotiations on the Ukraine, Putin said in his concluding Kremlin statement, will start “when the West and Kiev are ready for it. However, so far, we have not seen such readiness on their part.”  Xi replied in his Kremlin statement that his timing is longer than that. “We…firmly stand on the right side of history”, Xi said.    

For failing to appreciate this, the Biden Administration warfighters and their propaganda organs can be excused.  So long as Biden doesn’t die, they keep their confidence the field will be theirs, or at least the election clock.  

Less excusable are the failures to read correctly what the hands on the Russo-Chinese clock are pointing to by the anti-war Americans – old soldiers like Douglas Macgregor;  old professors like John Mearsheimer;  old dissenters like Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg; old journalists like Seymour Hersh. Because this is a long war, they are running out of time.

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by Editor - Saturday, March 25th, 2023
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by Evan Jones, Sydney, introduced by John Helmer 
  @bears_with

Fascism is the combination of force, fraud, and propaganda which replaces constitutional rule by parliament and the rule of law.

Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, and Greece under the Colonels, are 20th century examples in Europe. There are more recent and current ones — Ukraine since the putsch of February 21, 2014, is the obvious example. Another is French President Emmanuel Macron’s rule by decree, without the National Assembly, which began in 2020 with the emergency powers of the pandemic, and accelerated last week with the imposition of “pension reform” by decree, instead of parliamentary vote.

Outside Europe, there are the Australians who have been testing, training and practising fascist rule since the beginning of the pandemic.  So successful were they at that, they managed to keep several hundred thousand of their own citizens out of the country on a deception, unvoted by parliament, untested in the courts, but approved by the mass media. They are now preparing the population to go to war against China.

One of the chapters of the Australian story has just been reviewed by Evan Jones in Independent Australia, an internet site published in Brisbane. Here’s the site; read on for the review.  

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by Editor - Friday, March 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Igor Zyuzin (lead image), owner of the Mechel steel and coal group, and one of the few Russian metals oligarchs not presently sanctioned  by the US, is a running sore on the Kremlin’s policy of halting,  and also continuing,  industrial pollution.

From his base in Chelyabinsk, and at factories, mines, and ports from Moscow through the Urals to the Pacific coast, Zyuzin has defied decades of protests by residents, city and region investigations, court rulings, and promises by federal officials to stop the water, ground, and air pollution which his businesses have been producing.

Zyuzin is now telling the Kremlin he wants permission for more – more pollution, that is, at lower cost to the profit line on his balance-sheet.

The emergency economic measures being adopted for the war in the Ukraine, Zyuzin is claiming, should now relieve him and his company executives of criminal liability for intentional pollution, and Article 251 of the Criminal Code should be cancelled.  This provision in the Russian law allows regulators, prosecutors and courts to force the dismissal of culpable managers or to send them to prison for up to one year.  

Zyuzin has appealed through the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE), the oligarch lobby, for President Vladimir Putin to do this by implementing the promise announced in his Federal Assembly address last month. “I will repeat,” Putin said on February 21, “against the backdrop of external attempts to contain Russia, private businesses have proven their ability to quickly adapt to the changing environment and ensure economic growth in difficult conditions. So, every business initiative aimed at benefiting the country should receive support. I believe it is necessary to return, in this context, to the revision of a number of norms of criminal law as regards the economic elements of crime. Of course, the state must control what is happening in this area. We should not allow an anything-goes attitude here, but we should not go too far either. It is necessary to move faster towards the decriminalisation I mentioned.”  

“Everything we do is solidly rooted in market principles…We have avoided having to apply excessive regulation or distorting the economy by giving the state a more prominent role,” Putin added.  

The head of the RUIE lobby, Alexander Shokin, has been a Zyuzin retainer for many years. Over this time he and Zyuzin have persuaded Putin to accept the principle that Mechel should be allowed to violate the anti-pollution laws on condition it pays small cash penalties for its poison.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, March 15th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If China’s journalists, foreign intelligence analysts, and People’s Navy staff have needed an opportunity to demonstrate, if not to the Middle Kingdom audience,  then to the US exceptionalist public how peripheral and how mediocre American legends have become, Seymour Hersh has provided it in an interview Hersh (lead image, right) recorded with China’s state broadcaster CGTN on Saturday.

For the first time since Hersh’s earlier interviews with American, British, German, and Russian reporters, Hersh faced skepticism and cross-examination of the account he published  on February 8 of what he claimed then, and insists still, was a joint US and Norwegian operation to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines on September 26, 2022.

According to Hersh,  the operation was directed by the White House and ordered by President Joseph Biden, with the reluctant support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In his 28-minute interview with Liu Xin (left), Hersh repeats his original claims;  makes fresh mistakes of fact; discloses new source information.

Hersh also reveals he is so confident of the seniority and veracity of his  US intelligence ageny source – make that the CIA – he is not reading nor understanding the fresh evidence which has been published in the German mainstream media, the international internet, the US alt-media, and the New York Times. Dismissing it all, while revealing he has analyzed none of it, Hersh told Beijing television: “they are trying to divert attention from the story I wrote.”

Hersh also reveals that for verification of his story,  he employed fact-checkers from the New Yorker, the most virulently anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian magazine in New York.

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by Editor - Monday, March 13th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the original story of The Riddle of the Sands, two Englishmen sailing a yacht in the Frisian islands of the North Sea discover evidence of German military preparations to go to war and invade England. That was the plot of Erskine Childers’s novel of 1903, based on his yachting logs of several years before. It was the first of the spy novel genre – a best-seller, and a political warning at a time when few in the UK took German intentions and war plans seriously.  

In this week’s broadcast, the newest German plot is discussed for war against Russia, culminating in the involvement of German officials and Green Party politicians in the operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines last September. The new machination is 400 kilometres to the east of the old Childers plot.  

Did a yacht sailing from Rostock around the Darss peninsula rendezvous with a team of British-trained Ukrainian divers, their diving equipment, and a cargo of explosive which had been flown from Poland into an old Luftwaffe airfield?  Was the yacht a decoy while the operational vessel was concealed or camouflaged by others moving above the pipelines in coordination?

What is revealed about the plot from the recovery of the detonation residues on the seabed and the bomb which reportedly failed to go off remains in the secret keeping of investigators from Germany, Denmark and Sweden. But how to tell the fact – motive, weapon, modus operandi, perpetrators — from the fiction appearing in the German and US press? These questions are asked and answered in the new broadcast.

Also breaking news is the Kinzhal raid of Thursday night – a salvo of six hypersonic Kh-47 missiles – which reportedly hit secret underground bunkers in Kiev and Lvov and dozens of Ukrainian and NATO officers directing the war in the east.  

The broadcast winds up with an explanation of why Georgia cannot afford the latest US and European Union-inspired protests against Russia – and also why the Georgian government’s beggarly state budget can’t afford not to do what it is being told.

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by Editor - Sunday, March 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

James Bamford is forty years late in discovering that Israel not only spies against the US, but does so constantly and comprehensively, effectively escaping prosecution at the highest levels of government in Washington, and almost always lower down.   

Now almost 77 years of age, Bamford is not old enough to understand the reason for this is that the Israelis have managed a state capture in Washington that is longer lasting and more successful than the Ukrainians have pulled off for the Canadian government in Ottawa; or the Gupta brothers who took over the South African government in Pretoria. The last of these state captures was stopped in 2016 after just seven years.  

Still, Bamford has convinced the French publisher Hachette to print a news update of the Israeli takeover of the US government.  

The two of them reveal how exceptional they think this is by concealing the story over 215 pages (pp79-294) in the middle of Bamford’s 482-page book. Together, they have hidden any mention of Israel and its Zionist allies in the US from the dustjacket, flaps, and blurb on the outside of the book, and from the table of contents, chapter titles, and running page headers inside.  As disguise goes in spycraft, this is not so deep. It’s more a case of loss of nerve compounded by ignorance of the eighty-year history of Zionist operations which began in the White House of President Franklin Roosevelt.  

In Bamford’s subtitle – “Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence” — he presents an alibi and an excuse. No one is to blame except a handful of high-ranking officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) whom Bamford recommends retiring or discharging dishonourably. The excuse, according to Bamford’s tale, is that outwitted although the US security services may have been by the Israelis, the Americans have had one success – that’s the one against the Russians.

If the Israeli plots are facts with which Bamford excites readers as stranger than fiction, the Russian ones are fictions dressed up by his FBI, CIA and NSA sources to be stranger than facts. Most of them unidentified sources, natch.

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by Editor - Tuesday, March 7th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the history of the wars of the world, it almost never happens that the military strategy of a fighting state directs and revolutionizes the political strategy, and not the other way round —  as  aspiring politicians, military officers and policemen are taught by the venerable Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz to believe.

But it is happening in Europe now, on the Ukrainian battlefield, and in the war of the US and NATO alliance against Russia.

So long, Sun; so long, Carl; so long, Pardner!

For Russia it would never have turned out this way if President Boris Yeltsin had decided to run for a third term, ruling as medically incapable as President Joseph Biden,  but deferring the succession until after Mikhail Khodorkovsky had sold the Yukos oil company to the US, and the other Russian oligarchs created by Yeltsin had followed suit. Heart, brain, and liver disease stopped the Yeltsin part of that. The Vladimir Putin succession plan then failed to deliver what had been intended.

What has remained of the plan of the destruction of Russia from those days is what there is today.

The oligarchs survive but, according to the terms of the US and NATO sanctions war, they cannot have their assets and freedom of movement back unless they overthrow Putin, change the regime in the Kremlin, and destroy the capability of the Russian military to defend the country.

The defensive strategy in response is obvious. Not only must the capacity of Ukrainian forces and their NATO weapons be destroyed at the front, and their remainder driven to a territorial line west of the Dnieper River, between Kiev and Lvov, out of range of Russian Crimea, Zaphorozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk. Also, each of the NATO weapons must be defeated and destroyed which the US sends to the battlefield, and the airborne and ground systems for directing them at their Russian targets neutralized. .

If this Russian strategy succeeds, the implication for Europe – and the rest of the world (Taiwan) – will be plain. The US cannot defend NATO and NATO cannot defend its member states with a military capability that has been defeated. Article Five of the NATO treaty will become a dead letter. If and when that happens, the all-for-one-one-for-all principle of security in Europe which Article 5 promises will be replaced, first by the principle of every one for himself, and then by the principle of reciprocal security and non-aggression; that was the proposal of the Russian treaties of December 17, 2021.  

The political strategy of the US and NATO for Russia, having failed with Yeltsin’s replacement of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, and then with Putin’s replacement of Yeltsin in 2000, now depends on the survival of the oligarch system inside Russia. This too is under attack —  not from the Kremlin, but from the US and European sanctions war which has paralyzed the oligarchs and their networks in the west, and suspended their capital export schemes.

For the Russian oligarchs to hope to resume their business as usual in the post-war period, as they say they want,   the war on the Ukrainian battlefield should be short and the terms of armistice and settlement suspensive, equivocal, inconsequential – like the Minsk accords of 2014-15. Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel  and ex-French President Francois Hollande  have acknowledged why that is impossible for the Russian president, the General Staff, and the Russian people to accept.

The alternative Russian political strategy is the redirection of trade, capital, transport, and financial logistics to the east and south – principally China and India, but also Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and in time, the African one. For this political strategy to succeed, the success of the military strategy in Europe is a parallel requirement, a pre-condition almost. And so, in the practical logic of politics, for Russian military strategy to succeed on its terms, the Russian oligarchy must be transformed. This is happening.

As the Russian military strategy succeeds on the battlefield, the political will of the European people must also be transformed. This too is happening. Not every battle on every front can be explained at once, though.

Listen to the discussion of Russian tactics in the Donbass, the General Staff strategy for the Ukraine, and the political divisions widening inside the NATO states.

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by Editor - Sunday, March 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Two Englishmen, Timothy Garton Ash (lead image, left) and Mark Leonard (right),  and Ivan Krastev (centre), a Bulgarian, claim to have discovered from opinion polls they conducted in nine European Union (EU) countries during January that “since Russia’s war on Ukraine began, the US and its European allies have regained their unity and sense of purpose…Russia’s aggression in Ukraine marks both the consolidation of the West and the emergence of the long-heralded post-Western international order.”

“The growing hostility of Europeans towards Russia is reflected in their preference not to buy Russian fossil fuels even if it results in energy supply problems. This is the prevailing view in every one of the nine EU countries polled, with an average of 55 per cent of these EU citizens supporting it.It is now clear that, contrary to the Kremlin’s expectations, the war has consolidated the West, rather than weakened it.”

“Average” is a telltale admission from Ash, Leonard, and Krastev.

They have been employed to undertake the polling and write a summary of its reults by a European government think tank called the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).  Their report was published on February 22. Click to read it here.  

This “average” result has been fabricated by counting the response percentages in each of the EU country polls and dividing by their sum, nine. This “average” distorts and conceals the large differences in the poll percentages between the most anti-Russian countries – Estonia and Poland – and the more pro-Russian and antiwar states, such as Italy,  Spain, and Germany.

“Unity”, “consolidation”, and “hostility towards Russia” are the “prevailing view in every one of the nine EU countries” – that’s the headline conclusion from the think tank. It  appears to mean  the majority of people in Estonia think the same towards Russia and the war as the majority of Italians;  the majority of Poles the same as the majority of Spaniards or Germans.

But the evidence from Ash, Leonard and Krastev is a slip of their tongue between “prevailing”, which is a political term that doesn’t mean numerical majority; and “average” which is an arithmetical  operation which doesn’t measure difference – it erases the variation around the numerical mean.

Politically speaking about the Europe peoples, this is faking.  “I found the degree to which the national EU findings were subsumed in the overall figures, so that Germany could be diluted by Poland, for instance, fairly blatant,” commented a British expert on the war.

Asked to clarify the methodology for his published conclusion, Krastev refused, saying “I am putting in cc my colleagues from ECFR as they can answer your question.”

Speaking for Krastev, Ash and Leonard, Andreas Bock, a Berlin-based spokesman for the ECFR, acknowledged the individual country tabulations for each of the poll questions asked in each of the European countries were available to the report authors. But when asked for a public or press copy of these data, Bock refused to disclose them. He claimed “we can’t provide the intra-European data as we are preparing another piece using this [sic] data”.

Ash has been travelling outside England, his secretary said, but he had received the request for evidence to substantiate what he had written, and he would be replying. He has not, however. “Misrepresenting research data, withholding research data tables, faking research results, refusing to substantiate factual claims, and representing propaganda as professional work are grave violations of duty, standard and conduct for the holder of a university professorship”, Ash was asked. “How do you respond?”  He has not answered.

Ash,  Leonard,  and Krastev were asked by telephone and email to explain the stonewalling. “Is there a reason in evidence or interpretation why you believe this statement [of fabrication] does not apply to you?” There has been no response.

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by Editor - Thursday, March 2nd, 2023
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