By John Helmer, Moscow

President Vladimir Putin (left) has appointed his deputy chief of staff Sergei Kirienko (right) “Hero of Russia”, the highest award for personal valour in the table of Russian state decorations.   

Kirienko’s career includes presiding as prime minister over the 1998 default by the Russian  treasury, the only sovereign default since  repudiation of the tsar’s debts in 1918. More recently as head of Rosatom, Kirienko directed the failure to persuade the corrupt South African government to buy $50 billion worth of nuclear reactors.  The money involved in these feats was heroic in value, but until now Kirienko has not been judged to have performed pluckily enough in medallion terms.

Exactly which of Kirienko’s feats have warranted the hero award have not been disclosed publicly because the Putin decree remains a state secret.  Kremlin sources have told the state news agency Tass and other Russian media the decree was signed by Putin early in March, and remained secret until this week.

Asked to explain why Kirienko’s courage should be classified, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said  yesterday : “I do not comment on this message”.  Which is a reminder of the tale of the priest, the donkey, and the press. (more…)

by Editor - Friday, July 6th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy is a 450-page compendium by academics who earn modest livings in think-tanks at places in North America or Europe like Louisville, Hamburg, San Francisco, Rhode Island, Edinburgh, West Virginia, South Carolina, Southern California,  Newcastle, Uppsala, Tartu, and Helsinki. In the book Russian academics in Russia are outnumbered by the westerners by 26 to 8; all are on small state-paid livings led by Andrei Sushenkov, programme director at the Valdai Discussion Club. That 14-year old think-tank is financed by the Kremlin information chief Alexander Gromov and the president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.  

The handbook proprietor,  once a well-known 19^th century London publisher, is now the US  conglomerate Informa. It operates on the principle of Gresham’s Law – the more information you produce for sale, the less likelihood you will be outsold by the truth.  The Valdai Discussion Club and other think-tank creations in Moscow have been described by President Vladimir Putin as a “propaganda machine” to compete with their Anglo-American counterparts. To a Kremlin sponsored journalist, their output is “political marijuana smoke.”    

The handbook writers must be approaching retirement because they dedicate their work “to the younger generation of scholars of Russian foreign policy”.  The book begins: “The importance of studying Russian foreign policy (RFP) today is as great as ever.” By page 450 this is neither more  obvious, nor less.   (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, July 4th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

When cynical and unscrupulous men are desperate, they become as predictable as if they were principled. The difference between such men is hard to tell.

Not since the Alaska Purchase of 1867 have the rulers of Moscow and Washington been as desperate to sell something to each other for a price the press and public opinion on both sides are unprepared to calculate or accept.  When President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) and President Donald Trump (right) meet in a fortnight, this price will be a secret both of them will agree to keep to protect themselves from adversaries at home more powerful than they are themselves.

With two weeks still to go for preparations, so far only the terms the US side intends to table are in the public domain. No Russian government official, think-tank expert, or reporter has published an account of what the Russian terms will be.

During the Kremlin meeting last week between Putin and Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, one clue was visible. This was the appearance of the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on the Russian side of table, alongside the president’s foreign affairs advisor Yury Ushakov and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Shoigu wasn’t matched by a military officer or Pentagon counterpart on the American side of the table. So Shoigu wasn’t present to speak. He was there to listen, and to report to the General Staff what the US side is proposing – and not less significant, what Putin had to say. Shoigu’s presence was a signal that on the Russian side, the military do not quite trust the president — their own, not the other one. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, July 2nd, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Early this month a Chinese reporter asked President Vladimir Putin for an intimate detail of his life noone had requested (or been given) before. Asked how much time he spends on exercise each day, Putin replied: “Every day I spend about 2–2.5 hours doing sports. I go to the gym, I swim, sometimes I get out on the mat, if I have sparring partners, and sometimes I play hockey.”

The amount of time surprises European sources; they believe Putin, now 65 years of age, is setting something of a world record among heads of government or state. Moscow observers claim the number of Putin’s sport hours includes at least a half-hour undressing and dressing, perhaps his daily ablutions too. Even discounting that time, the sources remark it is more than twice the recommended exercise norm at Soviet sanatoriums built in Lenin’s and Stalin’s time to restore workers’ health from poisonous occupations at mines and smelters, and raise their productivity on going back to work.

A newly published book from London  is a portrait of the decline of these institutions in contemporary Russia, before they disappear entirely, their worker and pensioner clientele with them. A federal Health Ministry doctor observes that as the retirement age is stretched out by eight years for women (new target 63), five years for men (target 65, Putin’s age), state spending for the physical welfare to make the distance is being cut back. Several millions will not reach the sanatorium; they will have gone to the cemetery instead.  

This is a policy of cutting the state budget for pensioners by preserving the money in the  pension,  but culling the numbers of those living long enough to receive it. The ideology of the Soviet sanatorium has been liquidated; the real estate is being privatized; the surviving clientele redirected into fat reduction and cosmetic treatments for juvenescence.   (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There are many reasons why, to Russians who suffered through the regime of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin’s son-in-law Valentin Yumashev should be regarded with the same contumely as the people of Paris considered Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame in Victor Hugo’s tale.

Yumashev, who failed to complete a journalism degree but ended up ruling the Russian media, lacks the physical deformities, most of them.  But his attitude is the same. Quasimodo “turned to mankind only with regret”, according to Hugo. “His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that.”

 “When it shall please you to have me to fall,” Quasimodo told the hostile crowd, “you will not have to even utter a word, a glance will suffice.”

Yumashev and Putin have had such a relationship, a reciprocal one as it has turned out. So why is the bell-ringer who has been hiding in the Kremlin towers all these years – why is Yumashev, who calls his occupation a real estate developer, being revealed this month as Putin’s official advisor? The answer, says a Moscow source, is American.  “Yumashev is to Putin as [White House Senior Advisor Jared]  Kushner is to Trump.  Look carefully at their backgrounds;  their sources of money; their methods. Putin has calculated that it is up to Yumashev to negotiate with Kushner an end to the American war on Russia.” (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, June 26th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Adam Waldman, a Washington lobbyist, was authorized by Julian Assange in March of 2017 to set up a trip to Washington for Assange, and broad terms of discussion there between Assange and US Government officials of highly sensitive intelligence information, including US offers of assistance to protect Assange from “foreign espionage risks”. By that, Waldman meant Russia.

Waldman refused last week to discuss the details of his meetings with Assange and subsequent negotiations on Assange’s behalf in Washington. Late on Monday afternoon, Washington time, Waldman was reported as telling a US reporter: “Mr. Assange offered to provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases. Finally, he offered his technical expertise to the U.S. government to help address what he perceived as clear flaws in security systems that led to the loss of the U.S. cyber weapons program.” By “clear flaws” Assange appears to have meant flaws clear to Russia. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, June 25th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Over weeks and months of last year,  Adam Waldman (lead image, left), a Washington lobbyist with ties to the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, tried to lure Julian Assange (second from left) into making incriminating admissions to benefit the Democrats’ campaign alleging Russian collusion in Clinton’s defeat by President Donald Trump.  Assange tried to use Waldman for a deal with the US Department of Justice, exchanging an offer to withhold disclosure of classified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and trade other secrets, some Russian, in exchange for a grant of immunity from US prosecution.

At the same time, Oleg Deripaska (third from left), the oligarch in control of the Russian aluminium industry, paid Waldman to offer US prosecutors information about the Trump election campaign manager Paul Manafort and others connected to the Trump campaign, including Russians,  in exchange for a US Government promise not to impose sanctions on Deripaska.  Last week Luke Harding (right), a reporter for the Guardian, a London newspaper, sold the story of Waldman’s meetings with  Assange and Deripaska as a conspiracy to advance a scheme by President Vladimir Putin to control the US Government.

Four plotters; more than four schemes; money in Waldman’s and Harding’s pockets; not a shred of  truth. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, June 24th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In fear of  the Central Bank and the General Prosecutor investigating evidence of embezzlement, racketeering and fraud,  Boris Mints (lead image), a collector of  Russian painting of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, has fled to the UK.  How Mints turned his proceeds into artworks was one of the questions which Mints’s Museum of Russian Impressionism in Moscow was asked this week. Another was what dealings Mints may have had with Yves Bouvier, the Swiss operator of art transaction networks and freeport storages which are now the target of fraud and tax cases in Monaco, Switzerland, and the UK.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, June 19th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Canada has endorsed US trade warfare against China, Russia, the European Union states, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela,   but registers its dismay when the Trump Administration refuses to give Ottawa an indemnity pass so that it can benefit from the damage inflicted on the others.  

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has accepted a “Diplomat of the Year Award” from Foreign Policy Magazine, a subsidiary of the Washington Post and the Jeffrey Bezos media conglomerate which is sworn to topple President Donald Trump. Freeland’s supporters in the Liberal Party claim she has been exceptionally effective lobbying for Canadian interests in the US. After her lobbying has failed, Freeland claims it is unfair, absurd and illegal for the White House to threaten Canada with penalty duties on steel, aluminium, and cars.

In all common sense what can Canadians expect from the Americans if this is how Canada’s leaders behave? (more…)

by Editor - Monday, June 18th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Long before the Christians claimed credit for enunciating the Golden Rule, it was the ancient Greeks who started it off. By all reports, Jesus of Nazareth gave the Rule its positive spin – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Greek spin was negative – don’t do to others if you don’t want them to retaliate.    

The Jewish versions of the Rule are a bit guarded. That’s  because they distinguish between neighbours and brothers on the one hand; to them the Golden Rule applies. But enemies on the other hand – they get whatever is coming.

That’s also the Ukrainian version of the Rule. This explains why Chrystia Freeland, Ukrainian by blood, homeowner in Kiev,  and Foreign Minister of Canada (lead image, centre), thinks the Golden Rule in its Christian version applies between Canada and the United States, but not between Canada and Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Libya, and when she thinks circumstances call for it, Japan and other members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) —  Australia, Brunei, Chile,  Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, June 14th, 2018
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