By John Helmer, Moscow President Barack Obama issued an order yesterday imposing sanctions against seven Russians whom he and his government blame for the crisis in Ukraine. At the bottom of the Obama list at Number 7 is State Duma Deputy Yelena Mizulina (left), chairman of the Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 18th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow A reporter for the New York Times has scooped the global press in Sochi. Named David Herszenhorn, the newspaper’s specialist on the New York City borough of Queens, the reporter has uncovered a plot to kill a group of stray dogs – by poison darts causing suffocation — in front of […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, February 6th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow Oligarchy versus democracy is a very old game, and so are the seven deadly sins. Why exactly men like Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Prokhorov, Alisher Usmanov, Andrei Melnichenko et al. should calculate that advertising their standard of living should help them keep it is difficult to say. Maybe their pockets are under […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, October 20th, 2013
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By John Helmer in Moscow The growing number of tape-recorded disclosures from a bed belonging to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has attracted a rising vote of no-confidence in the prime minister from Italian voters, and unusual interest in what happened on the bed in much of western Europe. One Italian opinion poll published at […]

by John Helmer - Monday, July 27th, 2009
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By John Helmer The newsletter from the US Embassy warned recently that middle-aged American males should be on the lookout for a dangerous thief in Moscow who puts them to sleep before he or she steals their wallets, and any other property that can be carried off. At the start of the last century in […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 29th, 2002
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By John Helmer The only foreign-language sentence that managed to lodge itself correctly in the brain of Ronald Reagan, before he developed Alzheimer’s Disease but after he became President of the United States, was “doveryai no proveryai”. As he never tired of explaining, that is Russian for “trust but verify.” Reagan and his successors always […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 15th, 2002
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By John Helmer In 1833, four years before his wife’s flirtation caused the death, in a duel, of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, he wrote her a warning letter. “You like it when the dogs trail after you like a bitch in heat,” Pushkin said bluntly. “All you have to do is make sure everyone […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, August 10th, 1999
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