By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For the first time since the negotiations to end the Ukraine war began, President Vladimir Putin has sent as the chief Russian negotiator a General Staff officer and military intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov. The two Russians who have been closest to Putin, Vladimir Medinsky and Kirill Dmitriev, are not at […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It is possible that after four hours of talking until almost 4 in the morning, Yury Ushakov, the Kremlin equivalent of the US National Security Advisor, was so tired he omitted to report in his read-out a novel part of the negotiations. Ushakov’s read-out runs for 730 words; it was posted […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 22nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In all large criminal gangs – racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (RICO) as they are termed in US law  – there is always the mouth that talks tough; the pocket which collects the money; the gun that’s the enforcer. The mouth is the most expendable so long as the pocket keeps full […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A quarter of a century ago, President Vladimir Putin explained to President George W. Bush the way the warfighting world really works. “There is a contradiction between a new, young, aggressive financial Islamic capital and the old one,” Putin said.  “In reality, it is a financial issue. Religion is secondary. The […]

by Editor - Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Revealed for the first time in public is that President Vladimir Putin believes that international terrorism of the radical Islamic type is not the result of Middle Eastern conflict or of regional poverty or of Great Power proxy warfighting. Rather, he thinks it is a form of competition of the Marxist-Leninist […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On his way to meet Joseph Stalin in July 1941, Harry Hopkins (lead images, left) landed just out of range of German guns on a Moscow city airfield which, later, stretched a few hundred metres from my kitchen window. In Washington, DC, in 1976, his daughter Diana Hopkins (centre) sold her […]

by Editor - Friday, January 16th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For roughly half a millennium crows have come together in murders; foxes in skulks; cats in clowders; lions in prides; toads in knots; kangaroos in mobs. Podcasts appeared by name roughly twenty-one years ago,   and since then the medium, primarily a US one, has experienced a phenomenal rate of increase of listeners […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be,  a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that […]

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Pejorism is the idea that the world is getting worse so you should prepare yourself, your house, your country, your army. Meliorism — the opposite idea that the world is getting better, that time and history are on your side, etc. — has been so powerful for so long that it […]

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For the time being the Trump Administration and its allies conduct their war against Russia on the high seas, outside defended territorial waters, against ship targets which are unarmed, threaten no resistance. This is piracy, effective if the sight of the skull-and-bones flag triggers fear, shock, immediate surrender. In the Caribbean […]

by Editor - Thursday, December 25th, 2025
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