MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY AND IGOR SECHIN TRIGGER RELEASE OF ILYA YUROV IN LONDON EXTRADITION RULING

By John Helmer, Moscow

The Chief Magistrate of England, Emma Arbuthnot (lead image), ruled on Friday to dismiss an application from the Russian Prosecutor-General for extradition of Ilya Yurov, the control shareholder of National Bank Trust (NBT) before the bank was de-licensed by the Central Bank and transferred to Otkritie Bank at the end of 2014. It is Arbuthnot’s second judgement  in as many months against Russian prosecutors seeking alleged runaway fraudsters living in the UK.  

In the first case, involving the pursuit by Rosneft of Andrei Votinov, a former Rosneft board director and chief executive of the Tuapse oil refinery, Arbuthnot found that one of the Russian prosecutors had lied about his case to a Russian court. She also considered whether Rosneft and its chief executive Igor Sechin were powerful enough to prejudice the case against Votinov if he were ordered back to Russia. “I find the facts in this case lead me,” Judge Arbuthnot wrote, “to the conclusion that this is one of those exceptional cases where the defendant [Votinov] has shown there is a real risk that [Votinov] will suffer a flagrant denial of justice if he were to be extradited to the Russian Federation.”

Judging Yurov, Arbuthnot decided his extradition to Moscow to face trial is “not made for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his political opinions. It is being made because he allegedly stole a large amount of money from a bank.”

On the other hand, the judge ruled that because of Yurov’s links to Mikhail Khodorkovsky (lead image, frame rear left) and to Igor Sechin (right), and because of the ongoing Russian prosecution of the former and the interest of the latter in Yurov’s bank, “I cannot see how [Yurov] could not be prejudiced… there is a real risk he will suffer a flagrant denial of justice. His would be a very high-profile prosecution of particular interest to the [Russian state] and these are very exceptional circumstances.” (more…)

DIGGING UP THE DEAD FOR SALE AT THE TIMES OF LONDON — DEAD RUSSIAN AGENTS AND SPIES, THAT IS

By John Helmer, Moscow

Grave robbers used to need special skills to make their living.  Indifference to getting their hands dirty was one; a flexible spine for shovelling in the dark was another.  A nose and throat which didn’t gag at  the smell of rotting flesh was a third. 

John Witherow (lead image, right) , editor of the Times of London, has displayed some talents for his  37-year long rise in the service of Rupert Murdoch. He’s been so keen on grave robbing that once he didn’t realize the corpse he was lifting and selling in his newspaper was still alive. In that enterprise, Witherow’s accomplice was the Moscow correspondent for the Sunday Times, Mark Franchetti (lead image, left).  Their idea was that selling stories about a dead Russian agent was bound to attract paying readers. In January 2005 they tried it with the name of Claudia Wright, who was the Washington correspondent for the New Statesman of London between 1979 and 1986; also my wife.

This month Witherow is trying again, promoting a book by his associate editor Ben Macintyre. The corpse this time is different – it’s Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader; he died in 2010.  

But Witherow is careless. Macintyre’s new tale gives the lie to the one Witherow and Franchetti dug up about Claudia thirteen years ago. Claudia, they reported then, had tipped off the Soviet KGB to the identity of Oleg Gordievsky, one of the best double-agents the British Secret Service claims to have run against Moscow.  Macintyre says the report of the Claudia tip-off was a lie – “a false lead” according to Macintyre’s source at the CIA. The real tipster he now declares was the KGB’s double-agent at the CIA, Aldrich Ames, who told his handler in Washington, the head of KGB counter-intelligence in the US, Victor Cherkashin.

Macintyre reports also that Gordievsky, with the benefit of hindsight, says the same thing.

Cherkashin  published his own book in 2005.  “Ames also informed us that Gordievsky agreed to spy for MI6,” according to Cherkashin. “Ames identified Gordievsky in March [1985], the month before he started spying for us.”  Like Gordievsky, Cherkashin denied that Claudia had been the tipster.  Witherow and Franchetti ignored what both of them said, then turned their saying it upside down so that they became the Times’s sources for “speculation” about Claudia.

Cherkashin’s book concluded this was “little more than intelligence games. Their connection to real issues of national security…was often peripheral…during the last years of the Cold War, intelligence became a game of penetrating the adversary’s service. It was expensive and superfluous.” Unless you are selling the game to gullible readers. (more…)

PUTIN CORRECTS MISTAKES BY BITING HIS TONGUE ON TELEPHONE WITH ASSAD AND NETANYAHU

By John Helmer, Moscow

Last week President Vladimir Putin triggered the most serious crisis of his presidency, as the Defence Ministry and the Russian General Staff (Stavka) declared that Putin’s explanation for the downing of the Ilyushin-20 electronic reconnaissance aircraft by Israeli fighters was false, and worse –capitulation to Israel. 

Sources in Moscow report the military’s  loss of confidence in the Commander-in-Chief has not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military aid to Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, dismissing Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.  

“[Putin] has blundered with Erdogan, with Netanyahu,” commented one Moscow source. “In making all his concessions, one after another, Putin has been watched very carefully. His civilian advisors – [Foreign Policy Advisor Yury] Ushakov in particular – are making mistakes. They expect[ed] the show of strength in Syria would have changed US and European attitudes, and they would listen. They didn’t. So the Russian military have reminded Putin – we told you so.”

On Monday morning, following an unprecedented Sunday briefing at the Defence Ministry, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced measures which Putin has repeatedly dismissed over many years. The  new Russian war policy puts a stop to Putin’s assurances to the US, the European NATO powers and Israel that he was resisting the recommendations of his General Staff.  Putin’s resistance ended on Monday morning. Shoigu and the Stavka ended it. (more…)

PUTIN’S FORFEIT – FROM STRATEGIC MISTAKE TO STRATEGIC DEFEAT IN 24 HOURS

By John Helmer, Moscow

“When people die, especially in such unfortunate circumstances,” President Vladimir Putin said at a Kremlin press conference  on Tuesday afternoon, “it is always a tragedy”. The president was responding to the destruction of a Russian reconnaissance aircraft and the deaths of fifteen crew members during an Israeli Air Force attack on Syria on Monday evening. The Israeli operation was coordinated with British and French commands to spoof, confuse and overwhelm Russian and Syrian air defences.

“It is always a tragedy,” Putin went on – “a tragedy for all of us, for the nation and for the families of our people who lost their lives… In this case, it is more a chain of tragic circumstances because an Israeli fighter did not down our aircraft. It goes without saying that we must get to the bottom of this. Our attitude towards this tragedy is set forth in a statement by our Defence Ministry, and has been fully coordinated with me. As for reciprocal action, this will be primarily aimed at ensuring additional security for our military and our facilities in the Syrian Arab Republic. These steps will be seen by everyone.”

What will be seen by everyone has already been registered. According to Turkey, Putin has conceded Turkish military occupation of the Idlib governorate of northwest Syria, allowing Turkish Army  reinforcements from the west and north,  but preventing Syrian Army operations in defence of Syrian territory. According to Israel, Putin has accepted the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) air superiority over central as well as southern Syria and a free-fire zone for any target in Syria which Israel regards as hostile, including Russian military operations.  According to the Russian military command, Putin has forfeited his defence of Russian forces in Syria to the combination of Israel, France and the UK, which coordinated the combat against Syria on Monday evening. (more…)

THE MH17 MISSILE GOES HOME TO UKRAINE

By Max van der Werff, Amsterdam*

Today was a remarkable day. For the first time the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation held a press conference about the MH17 case in which it took a pro-active stance, instead of  responding, as it has before,  to challenges from its “partners” in the west. (more…)

MEMO FROM HENRY KISSINGER TO VLADIMIR PUTIN ON IDLIB — A REMINDER OF HOW THE TURKS AND AMERICANS DO THINGS TOGETHER

By John Helmer, Moscow

Greek investigative journalist Michalis Ignatiou revealed on Sunday the classified White House document of August 13, 1974, in which Henry Kissinger persuaded then-US President Gerald Ford that Turkey should be supported by the US in their two-wave invasion of Cyprus, seizing and occupying over a third of the island, deterring the Greek defence of Cyprus, and encouraging the Turks to ignore United Nations (UN) condemnation. According to Kissinger, “the Turkish tactics are right — grab what they want and then negotiate on the basis of possession. But if the Turks run loose on Cyprus, the Greeks could come unglued. We certainly do not want a war between the two, but if it came to that, Turkey is more important to us and they have a political structure which could produce a Qadhafi.”

This month the Kissinger scheme is being revived by the US, with support from Germany, France and the UK, to support Turkey in its seizure of the city and governorate of Idlib, in northwest Syria. Threats of US and NATO missile attacks have deterred the Syrian Army from attempting to reclaim its own territory. President Vladimir Putin has been pressured by the Turks, the US and NATO to delay Russian military support for the recovery of Idlib.

“There is no American reason why the Turks should not have one-third of Cyprus,” Kissinger told Ford in the Oval Office forty-four years ago.  Substitute Idlib for Cyprus today, and there is no American reason why the Turks should not have Idlib, no matter what UN resolutions on Syrian sovereignty require and the Kremlin supports.  Today, as Putin meets the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi, the question to be decided is whether the Kissinger scheme will prevail again. (more…)

MODEST MUSSORGSKY, RUSSIAN SINGING DESPITE WAR AND HUMBUG

By John Helmer, Moscow

Falling for a honey trap of their own imagining is what over-educated fools do.

There is nothing new about the present American belief in the malevolent power of Russia to have penetrated the American mind; that’s to say, American bedrooms, smartphones, chat networks, voting machines, power grids, and most intimate of all, American gun clubs.  It’s an old, familiar phantom – the projection of exceptionalists who are being outclassed in their heads and beaten on the ground. Americans believe they will only be desirable if they are over-powering. That’s their honey trap.  

Between 1968 and 1973, when the American infantry were pinned down by the Vietnamese forces, failing to defeat them with what the US Army and US Air Force thought was their overwhelming superiority of firepower, the ordinary American soldier believed the reason was the inverse of US military capacity. The Vietnamese were  winning, the soldier thought, because of their superiority, not only in fighting spirit, but in arms – ghost tanks, ghost helicopter gunships,  etc.

Since the end of Soviet rule, it was to be expected that Russians would abandon their own exceptionalist ideology and become infatuated by American and European things of every description, including things to spend money on, and safe havens to luxuriate among those things. It’s also to be expected that time is required before Russian things can be valued for their own sake by Russians. (more…)

FIRST STRIKE – WASHINGTON SAVED FROM THE VEKSELBERG BUNKER-BUSTER BOMB

By John Helmer, Moscow

The newest type of American bunker-busting bomb is expensive. So it’s understandable that the United States Air Force (USAF) doesn’t want a Russian to sabotage the bomb by installing steel casings which break apart before landing, or fuzes which detonate prematurely, or tail kits flying off- target, or warheads which bounce instead of bust.

On April 6, the US Treasury dropped a bunker-buster on the Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg (lead picture, top) in an attempt to destroy the worldwide business of his Renova group of companies. The US Treasury declared  Vekselberg had been targeted “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.  Vekselberg is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Renova Group.  The Renova Group is comprised of asset management companies and investment funds that own and manage assets in several sectors of the Russian economy, including energy.”

Vekselberg has also owned 26.8% of the Swiss steelmaker Schmolz+Bickenbach (aka Swiss Steel, S+B), which in turn owns all of the US steel forgings specialist, A. Finkl & Sons (aka Finkl Steel) of Chicago. Because the loss-making Swiss group was counting on the USAF bomb contract to boost revenues and profits from Finkl — it accounts for about 10% of S+B’s annual revenues — it was a sore point for the loser of the bomb contract, Ellwood National Forge Company of Ellwood, Pennsylvania,  that a Russian under sanctions might get his hands on the bomb deal, and even on the bomb itself. (more…)

THE YALE SCHOOL FOR AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGISTS, FOR REPEAT LOSERS

By John Helmer, Moscow

There’s not been an American war which John Lewis Gaddis doesn’t think was a good idea, speaking as if he was Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general and historian of whopping mistakes of calculation in warfare.

Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face was not an idea Thucydides thought a good one. Nor was he as blind to the significance of losing wars for Athenian strategy as Gaddis is  blind to the string of lost (outright or unwon and continuing) wars fought by the US — the Korean War, Cuban War, Vietnam War, Afghan War, Iraq War, Libyan War, Syrian War, and war against Russia. Gaddis even disapproves Robert F. Kennedy’s 1962 public acknowledgement that the US war against Mexico which resulted in the annexation of Texas was “unjustified”.

By the Gaddis standard of strategic success – that’s outcome matching aim, cost proportionate to gain — the last wars which Washington won were those against Mexico, Spain, the Philippines, the Caribbean Banana Wars, and the American civil war (Gaddis assumes the Indian wars were strategic successes too, but doesn’t dare say so in print.). He concedes World War I and World War II were strategic successes for the US in the sense that compared to the American allies, for a relatively small expenditure of men, blood and materiel, the US took an enormous cash profit and investment dividend, not to mention imperial sway. For the textbook on why the US is now losing that, Gaddis is the perfect specimen; this is because his primer reveals the teacher can’t recognize the writing on the wall, er blackboard. (more…)

JOHN HELMER APPOINTED SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR PRESERVATION OF RUSSIA-OLIGARCH CULTURAL LINKS

By John Helmer, Moscow

Announcement just released by the Russian Foreign Ministry, Information and Press Department: “Prominent investigator and martial writer John Helmer has been appointed Special Representative for Russia-Oligarch Cultural Links, Cultural and Historical Heritage in a voluntary capacity. The special representative will perform his duties without any financial remuneration and for the purpose of strengthening direct contacts, mutual understanding and trust between the Russian people and the oligarchs.” (more…)