THE PRESIDENT’S INFERIORITY COMPLEX , HIS ADVISOR’S RUSSIA-HATING OBSESSION, AND THE PUTSCH PLOTTER WITH THE ITCHY TRIGGER FINGER

By John Helmer, Moscow

The widow of Cyrus Vance, the only US Secretary of State to resign in protest against his president’s actions in a hundred years, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and Vance’s rival, “that awful man”. Not a single official of the State Department under Vance during the Carter Administration of 1977 to 1981, thought differently. Most of them had monosyllabic terms for Brzezinski.  Since Brzezinski died last Friday, not a single member of his own  White House staff has made a public statement in his honour, memory or defence. The mute ones include Madeleine Albright, who owed to Brzezinski her career promotion as an academic, then White House staffer, then Secretary of State herself.  

Despite the disloyalty of those closest to him, and the detestation for Bzezinski of those further away, he was, and remained, Carter’s favourite. Between 1977 and 1981, Brzezinski’s time with Carter, according to the White House logs, amounted to more than 20% of the president’s working time.  That’s 12 minutes of every hour — no other official came close. On Friday, shortly after Brzezinski’s death was announced by his family, Carter issued a statement extolling him as “a superb public servant…inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor …brilliant, dedicated, and loyal. I will miss him.”   

What was this bond between them, and why does it matter now?  One reason is that what they did together were the freshest American operations studied at KGB schools in Moscow by a recruit in training at the time named Vladimir Putin.

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ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, THE SVENGALI OF JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY, IS DEAD, BUT THE EVIL LIVES ON

By John Helmer, Moscow

If ever there was a man who displayed on his face the evil on his mind, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, (lead image, right) who died last week at a hospital near Washington.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who employed Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor between 1977 and 1981, the only high official post Brzezinski reached, said he “helped me set vital foreign policy goals, was a source of stimulation for the departments of defense and state, and everyone valued his opinion.”  Of Carter’s three claims, only the first is true; the second is ironic hyperbole; the third is completely false. If Carter cannot tell the truth now about Brzezinski, after having 36 years to reflect on it, Carter reveals the principal source of Brzezisnki’s power, when he exercised it.   For Carter was no innocent ventriloquized by the evil Svengali (lead image, left), as in the original Svengali tale. Carter was simply more mendacious than Brzezinski, and is entirely to blame for doing what Brzezinski told him to do.   (more…)

CRUISING ON THE SHIP OF STATE – DOES RUSSIAN TOURISM ABROAD SINK OR SWIM?

By John Helmer, Moscow

It used to be fashionable for European tourists of high class, especially the ladies with their menfolk, to visit wars and enjoy the display of artillery at night; the clash of infantry and cavalry on the battlefield; and the morgues where the casualties were displayed in naked and dismembered heaps afterwards. Frisson tourism then, extreme or shock tourism today.

The Crimean War, for example, was further away from London and Paris than St. Petersburg, but was visited by more British and French than Russian tourists; that was because the Anglo-French side was winning. These days American tourists do not cruise the waterways of the Persian Gulf; trek in the Afghan mountains; holiday in houseboats on the Tigris; or visit the ancient ruins of Leptis Magna (Libya)  and Palmyra (Syria).  The reason isn’t want of aesthetic taste for the sights or of appetite for frisson.   It’s because the US is losing the wars in those places. Tourists, like soldiers, want value for money and they aim to return home. (more…)

OLEG DERIPASKA TRIES BEATING LONDON MARKET REGULATOR WITH RUSAL, EN+ COMBO SHARE – HENRY FOY, FINANCIAL TIMES ENGAGED TO KICK UP THE PRICE

By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska (lead image, right), the controlling executive of Rusal, Russia’s state aluminium monopoly,  has run into difficulty winning the approval of the British Government’s stock exchange regulator, the UK Listing Authority (UKLA),  for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares in EN+. This is the holding unit through which Deripaska runs Rusal; the Siberian hydroelectricity generating company Eurosibenergo;  and coal and molybdenum mines.  Asked to respond to the informal approach which has been made so far on Deripaska’s behalf, UKLA spokesman Chris Hamilton refused to confirm or deny the approach, adding: “any interaction we may have with a firm wanting to list is confidential so [it] isn’t something we can comment on even off the record.”

Rusal insiders say no international bank has accepted Deripaska’s mandate to manage and underwrite a London Stock Exchange (LSE) listing for EN+.  That leaves only Kremlin backing for the share sale through the state banks, said the insider.  “My understanding is that VTB and Sberbank play an active role in it.”  

An earlier attempt, promoted by Deripaska in Bloomberg at the start of February, for Rusal to sell its shares on the LSE, was a feint, a Rusal source said. It was aimed at deterring Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim group, a minority shareholder which has been trying to sell its 17% stake in Rusal for years, from making a deal at a discount to the market price for the share. “It has never been seriously considered,” the Rusal insider said. “It was EN+’s and Rusal’s attempt to thwart Onexim’s sale of its Rusal shares to the market, which Deripaska considered harmful to Rusal. This is an example of fake news.”

Part of the problem, London market sources add, is that the EN+ share sale is viewed outside Russia as a bid by the Kremlin to demonstrate investor confidence in the future of  the Russian economy, despite sanctions.  “But if you can’t disguise that nobody is buying except for the Russian state banks, then the scheme is self-defeating, just  as the Rosneft share sale was last year.”  For details of that story, read. 

Another problem, market sources in London say, is that Deripaska himself has already demonstrated considerable risks for investors in the Hong Kong listing of Rusal, now priced at a third of its IPO value. Deripaska risk, they add, also led to the US Government rejecting a deal for the sale of the Opel division of General Motors to a Deripaska-led combination with Sberbank and German government funding; Deripaska was turned down in 2009. For details, read this. Last month, the Opel sale was agreed to the French Peugeot PSA group.

On May 15 Deripaska launched a lawsuit in federal US court in Washington, DC, in a bid to defend his reputation in that country. “Mr. Deripaska has never stolen assets from Ukraine or elsewhere”, lawyers for Deripaska say in the 12-page complaint against Associated Press (AP) of New York, which can be read here. It is defamatory, the lawyers add, to make Deripaska “appear to have been engaged in criminal conduct” and “making him appear infamous or odious.” (more…)

WASHINGTON POST REVEALS ISIS WAS “PARTNER” SUPPLYING TRUMP INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

By John Helmer, Moscow

A Washington Post reporter has revealed that the Islamic State (IS) laptop plot story, which President Donald Trump mentioned to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the White House last week came from IS itself, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The reason for the leaking against Trump, which followed in the Post and in the Anglo-American media, has also been disclosed by the Post. The CIA and at least one senior staff official of the National Security Council, who briefed the CIA on what Trump had said, are angry at the President for revealing collaboration between IS operatives and their US Government handlers in attacks on Russian targets, including Russian airline travellers. (more…)

VLADIMIR PUTIN IS SAFE IF DONALD TRUMP’S EXPERT ON RUSSIA IS FIONA HILL, BUT IS TRUMP?

By John Helmer, Moscow

When it first appeared in Washington in December 2013, the semi-thousand page biography of Vladimir Putin by two minor American think-tank researchers, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, was judged to be a valuable compilation of everything the US news media and other government-funded think-tanks had already reported, suspected or believed about the Russian president for the previous decade. No more, no less. In Russia, since no knowledgeable or politically significant Russian contributed evidence to the book,  much less. 

The subsequent publication of chapters on the putsch in Ukraine in February 2014, the accession of Crimea, Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the US war to overthrow Putin and fight Russia everywhere in  cyberspace, added nothing more remarkable in Washington, and nothing novel (non-fictional sense) in Moscow.

But had Hill not been appointed a few weeks ago as President Donald Trump’s (lead image, right) director of Russia at the National Security Council (lead left), the principal foreign policy advisor serving the President,  Hill’s book, with its one thousand and one footnotes, and fifteen single-spaced pages of references, led by Hill and Gaddy  themselves, The Economist, and extracts from the Voice of America,  would have been as inconsequential as  they have already proved to be for years. However, Trump’s confidence in, and dependence on Hill’s advice on Putin, and the campaign to impeach Trump himself for high crimes and misdemeanours in association with Putin, change the way the book  must now be interpreted.

Does the evidence that Hill spent two formative years as a student at an institute in Moscow where she rubbed shoulders with Russians bound for, and already bound to, the two state intelligence services, GRU (military intelligence) and SVR (foreign intelligence),  require a counter-intelligence assessment because of the risk which was unforeseen until now?   

Hill’s Moscow time is a detail of her resume which has yet to be identified in US media reporting and Congressional committee vetting.  But as a Russian source from the institute points out, “this is especially curious if we take into account the fact that the Moscow State Linguistic University is a source of supply of employees for GRU and SVR.  It was during the Soviet period, and it remains the same nowadays.” As another Russian source familiar with the secret services points out, by the standard of investigation the CIA, FBI and the US media now apply to Trump, his appointees, business associates, advisers, family,  and friends, does this detail require special scrutiny for Hill? “Her book,” claims the source, “is so full of false leads and dead-ends, don’t the Americans wonder if Hill is a sleeper agent, recruited long ago with the mission to keep the Americans as ignorant of Russia as her book on Putin demonstrates?”

If Hill is a continuing Russian penetration risk at the White House, then is there also the risk that the potentially culpable General Michael Flynn, National Security Adviser between January 20 and February 13, 2017, and his successor General H.R. McMaster, have failed to protect Trump himself? (more…)

CHRYSTIA FREELAND EXPOSED BY SERGEI LAVROV AT ARCTIC COUNCIL; DROPS “CANADIAN DEMOCRACY DESTABILIZATION” CHARGE AGAINST RUSSIA

By John Helmer, Moscow

The first meeting of Canada’s new Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (lead image, left) with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (right) has backfired when Freeland addressed Lavrov in Russian, and Lavrov replied that speaking in Russian will soon be illegal according to a new law proposed by the Canadian-backed regime in Ukraine.  “While Chrystia Freeland is free to speak Russian here in Alaska,” Lavrov told the press, “in Ukraine, where Russian has long been a native language for a huge number of people, it could soon lose its standing and status.”

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CHURCH GETS LAST LAUGH AND TAKES ST. ISAAC’S IN ST. PETERSBURG, PLUS THE MONEY

By John Helmer, Moscow

The name Isaac (lead image, right), son of Abraham (centre) and Sarah (left) in the Old Testament book of Genesis, meant “he laughs”. That was because Isaac was conceived when his mother thought she was long past child-bearing,  so Abraham started laughing at her news. He got more serious, later in the story, when he prepared to cut Isaac’s throat. Abraham thought he was doing God’s bidding, until God sent down new instructions.

The Isaac after whom St. Petersburg’s cathedral (Isaakievskiy Sobor, Исаа́киевский Собо́р – lead image, extreme right) – Russia’s largest; world’s fourth biggest church — is a different one. He too got the lucky last laugh. That Isaac was a fourth century Syrian by origin, who was living as a hermit contemplating Christian theology when Valens ruled the eastern Roman empire in nearby Constantinople.  Valens was a nervous, insecure sort who, with his brother, the co-emperor in Rome, had taken power by assassination, bribery and regular shows of military force.

Isaac was a go-getter, and insisted Valens give him an audience. Valens wasn’t so nervous he saw every Christian hermit in from the desert, so he refused. Isaac got his own back by broadcasting the meme that Valens would die shortly in a fire.  Valens threw Isaac in prison for sedition, where he stayed until Valens did die (378 AD), and the new successor emperor released Isaac to run a monastery on his pledge not to issue any more emperor death threats. Isaac was lucky too, because of the four versions of how Valens met his death,  one of them included fire. All of them recorded that Valens’s body was never found.

Because Isaac died on May 30 (383 AD), and that turned out to be the birthday of Peter the Great (1672), the tsar decided to turn Isaac into the patron saint of the Romanov dynasty. That’s what the current 19th century cathedral, built to replace smaller structures on the site, means. Its name signifies  holy war on the enemies of the tsar and  Romanov dynasty. That’s one, but not the only reason, a group of Russian Church bishops have recruited Kremlin support to order  Georgy Poltavchenko, St. Petersburg’s governor, to overrule his earlier decisions,  ignore the courts, city parliament,  and thousands of citizen petitioners, cancel state ownership of the building,  and hand it to the Russian Church to become its property.  

“The Church”,  according to close observers of its affairs in Moscow, “has persuaded the Kremlin to allow it to act above the law, and outside the law, too.  Thieving Church banks like Peresvet go unprosecuted. When businessmen take real estate, the state’s or each other’s,  it’s called asset raiding, and the courts often intervene. Not when the Church is the raider. But even raiding is not enough. The state budget, and of course ordinary taxpayers are being required to pay for the Peresvet Bank bailout,  and for running St. Isaacs, while the priesthood hang on to their gains.” (more…)

MIKAIL SHISHKHANOV PLAYS RUSSIAN BASEBALL – FOUR STRIKES, YOU CATCH, YOU SCORE

By John Helmer, Moscow

Mikail Shishkhanov (lead image, left and right) is the chief executive and control shareholder of B&N Bank (Бинбанк, BiNbank), one of the fastest growing banks in Russia today. What is driving that growth, however, is a combination of state money and influence in circumstances open to challenge from government regulators for the bank’s lack of transparency. 

Four recent transactions by the bank and related-party companies involving Shishkhanov have drawn a  warning from Central Bank first deputy governor, Sergei Shvetsov,  that cash from the Central Bank and from privately subscribed pension funds is what is driving B&N Bank’s growth, and not too prudently or lawfully.  “Shareholders are trying,” said Shvetsov, “to use the resources of pension funds not only for public investment in public instruments, but also to finance projects, fully or partially affiliated with the shareholders themselves”. To secure against conflict of interest and insider dealing, Shvetsov proposed to exercise “strict supervision.”

Shvetsov is head of financial market regulation at the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). His role, according to the bank,   includes “countering malpractice in the financial market, including regulation and control over the observance of the requirements of Russian Federation legislation on countering the illegal use of insider information and market manipulation.”

This week the CBR was asked to clarify whether it is investigating related-party dealings in the sale of $150 million worth of  B&N Bank bonds to the  Safmar pension fund group, both  controlled by Shishkhanov;  the sale to Safmar of Rb3.2 billion ($44 million) in shares of Evroplan, a leasing company also controlled by Shishkhanov;  the sale to Shishkhanov companies of Rb32.4 billion ($500 million)  in shares of Russneft,  the oil company controlled by Shishkhanov’s uncle, Mikhail Gutseriev; and finally, B&N Bank’s role in underwriting the sale of $60 million in fraudulent Tatfondbank bonds, weeks before the Central Bank imposed bankruptcy administration on Tatfondbank. The CBR would neither confirm nor deny, explaining “we don’t comment on actions connected with active banks.”

When the Federal Service for Financial Markets (FSFM), the formerly independent financial regulator  now part of the CBR organization and directed by Shvetsov, was asked the same question, it replied: “We don’t comment on active banks and companies.”  

A Russian oil industry banker says “it’s clear from Russneft’s share trading record since last November’s IPO that there is almost no sale volume. Also, the share price isn’t responding to the price of oil or to the movement of the other Russian oil companies. That means Russneft is closely held. There’s a fake float, not a free float.” (more…)

AT BOTSWANA BARBEQUE NORILSK NICKEL GETS BURNED — $277 MILLION DEFAULT, EMIRATI FAKING, BOTSWANA GOVERNMENT DECEIT FACE THE COURTS

By John Helmer, Moscow

Last year the government of Botswana decided to halt a 2-year old, multimillion dollar contract for its state mining company to purchase a nickel mine from Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining company. The government also decided to put its state nickel mining company into bankruptcy to protect against court claims from Norilsk Nickel. At the same time, the Botswanans tried arranging a buyout of their mining company by a penniless investment group in the United Arab Emirates.

A document, drafted on March 13 and circulating since then among Botswana Government officials, reveals details of the buyout and confirms that the Norilsk Nickel deal was negotiated in bad faith by the Botswanans without the money to pay for it.  The Botswanan Government then sought secret help from the South African Government to block the deal. 

This sequence of events, decided behind closed doors,   have so far cost Norilsk Nickel a contract worth $277.2 million, and the conviction that the Botswana Government cannot be trusted to honour either its obligations to foreign investors, or its promises of employment and prosperity to its own people. Mining sources in Gaborone, the Botswana capital, say it’s a case of politicians inexperienced in business “doing something either so clumsily they are culpably incompetent, or so cleverly they are corrupt. Either way the Norilsk Nickel case is a tragedy for the country.”

The deal was the last exit from Africa by the Russian company, convinced that Botswana is a much higher risk than has been admitted until now in reports of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Transparency International.  As for the smoking-gun letter, Sadique Kebonang, the Botswana mining minister to whom it was addressed, says: “I am unaware of it. I will look for it since you have brought it to my attention.” He declined “to respond to matters that are before court and are subject to the sub judice rule.” (more…)

RED HAS TURNED YELLOW – THE GREEK AND CYPRIOT COMMUNISTS ARE FLYING A DIFFERENT FLAG IN THE UKRAINE WAR



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Ukraine war is splitting the communist parties of Europe between those taking the US side, and those on the Russian side.

In an unusual public criticism of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and of smaller communist parties in Europe which have endorsed the Greek criticism of Russia for waging an “imperialist” war against the Ukraine, the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) has responded this week with a 3,300-word declaration:  “The military conflict in Ukraine,” the party said, “cannot be described as an imperialist war, as our comrades would argue. It is essentially a national liberation war of the people of Donbass. From Russia’s point of view it is a struggle against an external threat to national security and against Fascism.”

By contrast, the Russian communists have not bothered to send advice, or air public criticism of the Cypriot communists and their party, the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL). On March 2, AKEL issued a communiqué “condemn[ing] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calls for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukrainian territories….[and] stresses that the Russian Federation’s action in recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions constitutes a violation of the principle of the territorial integrity of states.”

 To the KPRF in Moscow the Cypriots are below contempt; the Greeks are a fraction above it.

A Greek-Cypriot veteran of Cypriot politics and unaffiliated academic explains: “The Cypriot communists do not allow themselves to suffer for what they profess to believe. Actually, they are a misnomer. They are the American party of the left in Cyprus, just as [President Nikos] Anastasiades is the American party of the right.” As for the Greek left, Alexis Tsipras of Syriza – with 85 seats of the Greek parliament’s 300, the leading party of the opposition – the KKE (with 15 seats), and Yanis Varoufakis of MeRA25 (9 seats), the source adds: “The communists are irrelevant in Europe and in the US, except in the very narrow context of Greek party politics.”

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IF IT SMELLS ALLURING, IT’S RUSSIAN – IN WARTIME L’ORÉAL (FRANCE) AND ESTÉE LAUDER (US) MAKE A BAD SMELL



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The war plan of the US and the European allies is destroying the Russian market for traditional French perfumes, the profits of the French and American conglomerates which own the best-known brands, the bonuses of their managers, and the dividends of their shareholders. The odour  of these losses is too strong for artificial fresheners.

Givaudan, the Swiss-based world leader in production and supply of fragrances, oils and other beauty product ingredients, has long regarded the Russian market as potentially its largest in Europe; it is one of the fastest growing contributors to Givaudan’s profit worldwide. In the recovery from the pandemic of Givaudan’s Fragrance and Beauty division – it accounts for almost half the company’s total sales — the group reported “excellent double-digit growth in 2021, demonstrating strong consumer demand for these product categories.”    Until this year, Givaudan reveals in its latest financial report, the growth rate for Russian demand was double-digit – much faster than the  6.3% sales growth in Europe overall; faster growth than in Germany, Belgium and Spain.    

Between February 2014, when the coup in Kiev started the US war against Russia, and last December, when the Russian non-aggression treaties with the US and NATO were rejected,   Givaudan’s share price jumped three and a half times – from 1,380 Swiss francs to 4,792 francs; from a company with a market capitalisation of 12.7 billion francs ($12.7 billion) to a value of 44.2 billion francs ($44.2 billion). Since the fighting began in eastern Ukraine this year until now, Givaudan has lost 24% of that value – that’s $10 billion.  

The largest of Givaudan’s shareholders is Bill Gates. With his 14%, plus the 10% controlled by Black Rock of New York and MFS of Boston, the US has effective control over the company.

Now, according to the US war sanctions, trade with Russia and the required payment systems have been closed down, alongside the bans on the importation of the leading European perfumes. So in place of the French perfumers, instead of Givaudan, the Russian industry is reorganizing for its future growth with its own perfume brands manufactured from raw materials produced in Crimea and other regions, or supplied by India and China. Givaudan, L’Oréal (Lancome, Yves Saint Laurent), Kering (Balenciaga, Gucci), LVMH (Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy), Chanel, Estée Lauder, Clarins – they have all cut off their noses to spite the Russian face.

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THE WAR AGAINST FOOD – WHO IS TO BLAME



By Nikolai Storozhenko, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This week President Joseph Biden stopped at an Illinois farm to say he’s going to help the  Ukraine ship 20 million tonnes of wheat and corn out of storage into export, thereby relieving  grain shortages in the international markets and lowering bread prices around the world.  Biden was trying to play a hand in which his cards have already been clipped. By Biden.  

The first Washington-Kiev war plan for eastern Ukraine has already lost about 40% of the Ukrainian wheat fields, 50% of the barley, and all of the grain export ports. Their second war plan to hold the western region defence lines with mobile armour, tanks, and artillery  now risks the loss of the corn and rapeseed crop as well as the export route for trucks to Romania and Moldova. What will be saved in western Ukraine will be unable to grow enough to feed its own people. They will be forced to import US wheat, as well as US guns and the money to pay for both.

Biden told his audience that on the Delaware farms he used to represent in the US Senate “there are more chickens than there are Americans.”  Blaming the Russians is the other card Biden has left.  

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EXILE



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The problem with living in exile is the meaning of the word. If you’re in exile, you mean you are forever looking backwards, in geography as well as in time. You’re not only out of place; you’re out of time — yesterday’s man.

Ovid, the Roman poet who was sent into exile from Rome by Caesar Augustus, for offences neither Augustus nor Ovid revealed, never stopped looking back to Rome. His exile, as Ovid described it, was “a barbarous coast, inured to rapine/stalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war.” In such a place or state, he said, “writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.”

The word itself, exsilium in Roman law, was the sentence of loss of citizenship as an alternative to loss of life, capital punishment. It meant being compelled to live outside Rome at a location decided by the emperor. The penalty took several degrees of isolation and severity. In Ovid’s case, he was ordered by Augustus to be shipped to the northeastern limit of the Roman empire,  the Black Sea town called Tomis; it is now Constanta, Romania. Ovid’s last books, Tristia (“Sorrows”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Black Sea Letters”), were written from this exile, which began when he was 50 years old, in 8 AD, and ended when he died in Tomis nine years year later, in 17 AD.  

In my case I’ve been driven into exile more than once. The current one is lasting the longest. This is the one from Moscow, which began with my expulsion by the Foreign Ministry on September 28, 2010.  The official sentence is Article 27(1) of the law No. 114-FZ — “necessary for the purposes of defence capability or security of the state, or public order, or protection of health of the population.” The reason, a foreign ministry official told an immigration service official when they didn’t know they were being overheard, was: “Helmer writes bad things about Russia.”

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IN THE FOG OF WAR THERE’S THE GUTERRES CERTAINTY AND THE CADIEU CERTAINTY – GORILLA RADIO SEES THROUGH THE COVER-UP



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Antonio Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), who attempted last month  to arrange the escape from Russian capture of Ukrainian soldiers and NATO commanders,  knowing they had committed war crimes. He was asked to explain; he refuses.   

Trevor Cadieu is a Canadian lieutenant-general who was appointed the chief of staff and head of the Canadian Armed Forces last August; was stopped in September; retired from the Army this past April, and went to the Ukraine, where he is in hiding. From whom he is hiding – Canadians or Russians – where he is hiding, and what he will say to explain are questions Cadieu isn’t answering, yet.

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DID UN SECRETARY-GENERAL GUTERRES COMMIT A WAR CRIME AT AZOVSTAL?

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is refusing this week to answer questions on the role he played in the recent attempt by US, British, Canadian and other foreign combatants to escape the bunkers under the Azovstal plant, using the human shield of civilians trying to evacuate.

In Guterres’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on April 26 (lead image), Putin warned Guterres he had been “misled” in his efforts. “The simplest thing”, Putin told Guterres in the recorded part of their meeting, “for military personnel or members of the nationalist battalions is to release the civilians. It is a crime to keep civilians, if there are any there, as human shields.”  

This war crime has been recognized since 1977 by the UN in Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention.  In US law for US soldiers and state officials, planning to employ or actually using human shields is a war crime to be prosecuted under 10 US Code Section 950t.  

Instead, Guterres ignored the Kremlin warning and the war crime law, and authorized UN officials, together with Red Cross officials,  to conceal what Guterres himself knew of the foreign military group trying to escape. Overnight from New York, Guterres has refused to say what he knew of the military escape operation, and what he had done to distinguish, or conceal the differences between the civilians and combatants in the evacuation plan over the weekend of April 30-May 1.May.

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THE LAST DITCH IS POLAND – RUSSIA’S PHASE-3 PLAN FOR WESTERN UKRAINE



By Vlad Shlepchenko, introduced & translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The more western politicians announce pledges of fresh weapons for the Ukraine, the more Russian military analysts explain what options their official sources are considering to destroy the arms before they reach the eastern front, and to neutralize Poland’s role as the NATO  hub for resupply and reinforcement of the last-ditch holdout of western Ukraine.

“I would like to note,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, repeated yesterday, “that any transport of the North Atlantic Alliance that arrived on the territory of the country with weapons or material means for the needs of the Ukrainian armed forces is considered by us as a legitimate target for destruction”.  He means the Ukraine border is the red line.

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THE MATLIN PLOT, THE BROWDER PLOT AND THE NEW YORK TIMES PLOT



By Lucy Komisar,  New York*
  @bears_with

Here’s a story the New York Times has just missed.

US politicians and media pundits are promoting the targeting of “enablers” of Russian oligarchs who stash their money in offshore accounts. A Times article of March 11   highlighted Michael Matlin, CEO of Concord Management as such an “enabler.” But the newspaper missed serious corruption Matlin was involved in. Maybe that’s because Matlin cheated Russia, and also because the Matlin story exposes the William Browder/Sergei Magnitsky hoax aimed at Russia.

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YELLOW COAL, THE FUEL MADE OUT OF RACE HATRED — MAY DAY MESSAGE FROM SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY, 1939



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In 1939 a little known writer in Moscow named Sigizmund Khrzhizhanovsky published his idea that the Americans, then the Germans would convert human hatred into a new source of energy powering everything which had been dependent until then on coal, gas, and oil.

Called yellow coal, this invention originated with Professor Leker at Harvard University. It was applied, first to running municipal trams, then to army weapons, and finally to cheap electrification of everything from domestic homes and office buildings to factory production lines. In Russian leker means a quack doctor.

The Harvard professor’s idea was to concentrate the neuro-muscular energy people produce when they hate each other.  Generated as bile (yellow), accumulated and concentrated into kinetic spite in machines called myeloabsorberators, Krzhizhanovsky called this globalization process the bilification of society.

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IS CAESARISM THE PROBLEM, THE SOLUTION, A FANCY DRESS COSTUME, OR A PROPAGANDA CARTOON?



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In imperial history there is nothing new in cases of dementia in rulers attracting homicidal psychopaths to replace them.  It’s as natural as honey attracts bees.

When US President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke on October 19, 1919, he was partially paralysed and blinded, and was no longer able to feed himself, sign his name, or speak normally; he was not demented.

While his wife and the Navy officer  who was his personal physician concealed his condition, there is no evidence that either Edith Wilson or Admiral Cary Grayson were themselves clinical cases of disability, delusion,  or derangement. They were simply liars driven by the ambition to hold on to the power of the president’s office and deceive everyone who got in their way.  

The White House is always full of people like that. The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution is meant to put a damper on their homicidal tendencies.

What is unusual, probably exceptional in the current case of President Joseph Biden, not to mention the history of the United States,  is the extent of the president’s personal incapacitation; combined with the clinical evidence of psychopathology in his Secretary of State Antony Blinken;  and the delusional condition of the rivals to replace Biden, including Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Like Rome during the first century AD, Washington is now in the ailing emperor-homicidal legionary phase.  But give it another century or two, and the madness, bloodshed, and lies of the characters of the moment won’t matter quite as much as their images on display in the museums of their successors craving legitimacy, or of successor powers celebrating their superiority.  

Exactly this has happened to the original Caesars, as a new book by Mary Beard, a Cambridge University professor of classics, explains. The biggest point of her book, she says, is “dynastic succession” – not only of the original Romans but of those modern rulers who acquired the Roman portraits in marble and later copies in paint, and the copies of those copies, with the idea of communicating “the idea of the direct transfer of power from ancient Romans to Franks and on to later German rulers.”

In the case she narrates of the most famous English owner of a series of the “Twelve Caesars”, King Charles I — instigator of the civil war of 1642-51 and the loser of both the war and his head – the display of his Caesars was intended to demonstrate the king’s self-serving “missing link” between his one-man rule and the ancient Romans who murdered their way to rule, and then apotheosized into immortal gods in what they hoped would be a natural death on a comfortable bed.

With the American and Russian successions due to take place in Washington and Moscow in two years’ time, Beard’s “Twelve Caesars, Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern”,  is just the ticket from now to then.

(more…)
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