By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It was just before high noon in Moscow on Thursday, June 19, when President Vladimir Putin initiated his telephone call to President Xi Jinping of China. A read-out by Putin’s foreign policy assistant, Yury Ushakov, followed almost immediately.   Xi did not authorize his summary for twenty-four hours until the Chinese […]

by Editor - Thursday, June 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Exaggerating the true fact to mean the false factoid is SOP (standard operating procedure) in information warfare. It’s to be expected from President Donald Trump (lead image, right) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and their intelligence chiefs (centre), military officers, and media supporters. The truest of the facts in the […]

by Editor - Thursday, June 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The plan to attack Iran, force regime change in Teheran, decapitate and disarm Iranian forces, and partition the country into ethnic autonomies is nothing new.   In August 1941 British and empire forces (Indian, Australian) acted in coordination with Soviet forces to occupy the country, ostensibly to prevent the Shah of […]

by Editor - Tuesday, June 17th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with There are no flies on President Vladimir Putin. That’s an expression which originated in the fly-blown goldrush mines of Australia in 1840 and then moved with the flies to the goldrush mines of California a few years later. Literally, it means a man who is too quick for a fly to […]

by Editor - Sunday, June 15th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Oreshnik Moment was first coined on June 1 here  and then discussed in the Reason2Resist podcast on June 3.  It’s a period of time – it’s not a prediction of the counter-attack which the Russian General Staff will launch against the June 1 drone attack on the bomber element of the […]

by Editor - Saturday, June 14th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Today is the Russian national holiday which President Boris Yeltsin first introduced to celebrate himself and whitewash the crimes he committed against the country. For reminder today, a kindly reader has found a series of interviews on Yeltsin and his crimes, which I first recorded in my study on Kolobovsky pereulok, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with President Donald Trump believes – because his opinion pollsters tell him – that pre-emptive attack wins the battleground. That’s to say, the battleground states in US elections. Federalizing California state firefighting troops and ordering them with US Marines – 5,000 of them so far — into action in Los Angeles is […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The game of tell-and-consequences begins with a prompt. In response each player must then write down a word or phrase without knowing what word or phrase has been written by the previous players. When the sequence and accumulation of words and phrases from all the players around the table is complete, […]

by Editor - Sunday, June 8th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with With the Oreshnik Moment on pause, who will say what is to be gained, what risked, what lost when President Vladimir Putin decides to play Molotov (lead image, lower right) to these two Ribbentrops (lead image, top left and right)? “We have so much in common”, President Donald Trump was told […]

by Editor - Friday, June 6th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Lenin hasn’t been a favourite of President Vladimir Putin’s. He’s derided him: “Ukraine appeared in 1922…Now the grateful descendants are smashing monuments to Lenin, the founder of Ukraine.”   The second last time he mentioned Lenin, in February 2024, Putin blamed him. “For some unknown reasons, he transferred to that newly established Soviet […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 4th, 2025
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