By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump began rigging his latest attempt  to win the Nobel Peace Prize in January 2024, a year before the Norwegian Prize Committee closed the 2025 prize nominations on January 31. That was also eleven months before Trump was elected president to begin the peacemaking streak which he currently lists as Pakistan and India, Iran and Israel, Congo and Rwanda, Israel and Hamas, and Kosovo and Serbia.

Trump had told Republican congresswoman Claudia Tenney to file her nomination on January 30, 2024, and so – owing Trump a great deal of election campaign endorsements and money in 2018  and again in 2024  — Tenney did exactly that on January 30, 2024.

It’s not exactly clear from the Norwegian rules whether that nomination has been held over to  qualify Trump for this year. So on April 24 at the White House Trump told Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to make sure of the rules. “I salute President Trump… on that we work together,”  Støre said, adding: “on that prize, you know, there is a committee taking care of that which is completely working on its own terms and I cannot comment on that.”  

Trump then told the Pakistan’s Army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir,  to arrange for Pakistan to file its prize nomination; Trump lunched with Munir at the White House on June 18;  the nomination was announced in Islamabad on June 21.    

Trump’s advisors thought a Muslim nomination mightn’t do the trick in Oslo so they recommended Trump ask for a Jewish one. This was produced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at dinner with Trump on July 8.  

The Prize Committee is due to announce the winner on October  10.  Pope Leo XIII has agreed to come to Trump but not in time to nominate him.  

The only Christian head of state to decline Trump’s invitation to a prize-winning session is President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Trump has been asking him since their telephone call on February 12.  He repeated himself when they spoke on July 3.    But Putin said no.    

Trump has been announcing his response ever since. “I’m not happy with that”, he said after five hours.“  An hour later:  “Yeah, I’m very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin…And I, I’m very disappointed.”   On July 6: “I was very disappointed with my call with President Putin. I was very disappointed.”  On July 7, meeting with Netanyahu Trump repeated twice over:  “I’m disappointed, frankly, that President Putin hasn’t stopped. I’m not happy about it.”   On July 8 he told a Cabinet meeting: “We’re not happy with Putin. I’m not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now ‘cause he’s killing a lot of people…And I’m not happy with Putin.”  

Is this a cognitive symptom Trump is revealing?

Repetitive stress injury can affect the brain, according to Russian experts. US experts call it chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from injuries to head. Obliteration – another repeated Trump word    – of brain cells is the direct cause. Visible symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic of Cleveland, are “Trouble thinking. Memory loss. Problems with planning, organizing and carrying out tasks. Behavioral changes. Impulsive behaviour. Aggression.”  

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, “Trump’s Masterplan DESTROYED by Putin in One Move!” we discuss the Russian diagnosis of Trump’s symptoms, and the new Kremlin decisions to follow.   

In Moscow a very well-informed source comments: “Nobel Peace Prize was always the Olympic Gold for war criminals so he has that sealed. The Peace Prize repeat now includes Serbia and Kosovo. The slaps at Putin are explicit. Papa is disappointed that Vova is a bad boy and didn’t give him his ceasefire. We have to accept the Russian diplomacy option has failed and there is continuity in US policy. All the more reason and case for a very loud and unmistakable military victory.”

A NATO veteran comments: “He doesn’t need to be to more mentally competent than Biden. Everything is in place. From Congress, Senate, Supreme Court, law enforcement, the military, right down to the local pub; the raids, detentions, firings, threats, international aggression. It’s all baked in.”

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 9th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russian public opinion isn’t well understood in the US because Russian opinion changes with the news from the Ukraine battlefield and from President Donald Trump’s (lead image, right) warmaking elsewhere; because there are more Americans who want to be loved by Russians than there are Russians who want to be loved by Americans; and because US experts on Russia haven’t caught up with the latest Russian opinion polling.  

This reveals that the initial Russian optimism of last December and January that Trump’s inauguration might produce a negotiated end to the war is evaporating rapidly. Immediately after the presidential election last November, Levada, an independent Moscow pollster, reported that 54% of Russians surveyed across the country were hopeful of an improvement in relations with the US. This had shrunk to 44% in January after the inauguration.   At that time, the Levada poll revealed that “almost two thirds of the respondents rate relations between Russia and the United States as bad. The majority of respondents have a bad attitude towards Joe Biden, while the majority have a good attitude towards Donald Trump. The good attitude towards Trump is due to his attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict and improve relations with Russia.”

That was measured between February 20 and 25. The survey followed Trump’s telephone call with President Vladimir Putin on February 12 and the first round of face-to-face negotiations between US and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on February 18.

Five months later, after the Russian media have reported Trump’s bombing of Yemen and  Iran, his involvement in the drone attack on Russian bomber bases on June 1, and the failure of the end-of-war negotiations in Istanbul, the Levada Centre has not yet reported the shift in Russian sentiment towards Trump.

Because Russians also report believing that Germany follows US orders, and that the German tanks which invaded Kursk between last August and December have now been destroyed,  public hostility towards the Germans as the “main enemy” is shrinking below the levels of hostility recorded towards France and the UK.

A poll released in mid-May by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM)  ranked France several points ahead of the UK and Germany on the enemies list. “The three ill-wishers included: France (48%, +27 p.p. from 2022), the United Kingdom (42%, +3 p.p.) and Germany (41%, +9 percentage points).”    “For the first time in the history of monitoring, the United States lost its leadership in the rating of ill-wishers at once to three European countries, the so-called leaders of the ‘coalition’ in the conflict in Ukraine – France, Great Britain and Germany — which is largely due to the change of power abroad and their rhetoric to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.”

Levada analyst Denis Volkov was asked if he believes the trend for the “main enemy” was a flash in the pan towards Germany, and is now reverting towards the US again. He replied that Levada hasn’t made a new poll on this question so he cannot say if this trend has taken place or not.

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 8th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump thought he had gotten the deal terms and the cover story right, and also the prize for himself (the Nobel Peace Prize ).

The deal was that under cover of an authorized leak to the press from Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eldridge Colby, that the US was running out of ammunition for Israel’s war with Iran, for the Ukraine war with Russia, and for US military stocks at their DEFCON  levels,  Trump would pause ammunition deliveries to the regime in Kiev, and then persuade President Vladimir Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire in exchange.

That’s the ceasefire which, since February, Trump has been asking Putin to announce at a summit meeting between the two of them. That’s also the fourth ceasefire in the row which Trump has been counting as his personal achievements – between Pakistan and India on May 10; between Iran and Israel on June 23; and between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda on June 27.   

Only the scheme has failed.

A Moscow source in a position to know explains: “The Russian calculus recognizes the tipping point [for US arms supplies to the Ukraine]. Until then the General Staff will grind away methodically, slowly. Then when the Western supplies run low, we will hit fast and hard. If you total the June attacks, the picture emerges clearly that Putin has chosen the Oreshnik option – without firing it yet  — over compromising on Trump’s terms. The outskirts of Kiev are burning like never before.”

There are American exceptionalists who insist they thought of this before —  in 1943, in fact, when Walter Lippmann spelled out what has come to be called (by Ivy League professors) the “Lippmann Gap”.  This is no more nor less than the ancient maxim — don’t bite off more than you can chew. But in Lippmann’s verbulation:  “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power. I mean by a foreign commitment an obligation, outside the continental limits of the United States, which may in the last analysis have to be met by waging war. I mean by power the force which is necessary to prevent such a war or to win it if it cannot be prevented. In the term necessary power I include the military force which can be mobilized effectively within the domestic territory of the United States and also the reinforcements which can be obtained from dependable allies.”  

From the Russian point of view, the first two of Trump’s ceasefires have been clumsily concealed rescues for Pakistan and Israel; the Congo-Rwanda terms remain undecided; and the “necessary power” to reverse the defeat of the US, its “dependable allies”, and its proxies in the Ukraine has already been defeated. It won’t be Putin, however, to announce publicly that Trump has no “comfortable power in reserve”.  

That, however, was Putin’s private message to Trump in their telephone call on July 3. “Russia would strive to achieve its goals,” was the way Putin allowed his spokesman to disclose:  “namely the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs, the bitter confrontation that we are seeing now. Russia will not back down from these goals.”  

This is the reason Trump later acknowledged: “[I] didn’t make any progress with him today at all.”   It’s also the reason Trump beat a retreat  from failure. “I’m very disappointed. Well, it’s not, I just think, I don’t think he’s [Putin] looking to stop. And that’s too bad. This, this fight, this isn’t me. This is Biden’s war.”  

Here are the pieces of the intelligence assessment assembled in Moscow which led to the escalation of drone and missile attacks on Kiev since last Thursday night.

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by Editor - Monday, July 7th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the hour-long telephone call on Thursday (July 3) between the presidents of Russia and the United States, something President Vladimir Putin said, and also didn’t say, got up President Donald Trump’s nose.

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by Editor - Friday, July 4th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump has said he believes he can use nuclear weapons to destroy his enemy’s forces for defending itself, including the enemy’s capacity for deterrence by nuclear counter-attack. This is Trump’s new doctrine of “total obliteration”. It is US shock and awe tipped over the nuclear threshold; it is American first-strike nuclear attack.

“It was so bad that they ended the war,” Trump told the press at the NATO summit in The Hague last Thursday (June 26). Speaking of the US bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment and weaponization plants on June 22, Trump said: “It ended the war. Somebody said in a certain way that it was so devastating, actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war, too. This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”   

The enemy Iranians, claimed Trump, were taken by surprise and had no defence. “They didn’t get to see it. It was dark. That’s the amazing thing about the shots. They hit the shots perfectly and yet it was dead dark. There was no moon. There was no light. It was virtually a moonless. It was very dark and they hit — the shots were hit perfectly.”

“It was called obliteration,” Trump said. “It’s been obliterated. Totally  obliterated.” He kept repeating the word obliteration eleven times in forty-seven minutes. “No other military on earth could have done it. And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.”  

President Vladimir Putin has not responded to Trump’s claims. Instead, he told reporters on June 27 that he “hold[s] the incumbent President of the United States in the highest regard. His path to returning to power and to the White House has been exceptionally arduous, complex, and hazardous – a fact of which we are all cognisant, particularly given the assassination attempts he has survived, indeed multiple attempts on his life. He is a courageous man, that much is evident.”  

Putin was showing no more respect and courtesy towards Trump than he had shown President Joseph Biden, despite the onset of Biden’s dementia which was too obvious to ignore in private, if not in public. After meeting with Biden in Geneva in 2021, Putin had said:  “I want to say that the image of President Biden that our press and even the American press paints has nothing in common with reality. He was on a long trip, had flown across the ocean, and had to contend with jet lag and the time difference. When I fly it takes its toll. But he looked cheerful, we spoke face-to-face for two or maybe more hours. He’s completely across his brief. He himself does not miss anything, I assure you. It was completely obvious to me.”  

These are not personal compliments; Putin is not ingratiating the US presidents. He is expressing the fundamental assumption in Russian warfighting strategy that whatever their personal eccentricities, medical handicaps, or psychiatric symptoms, the US president will always act rationally in the escalation towards nuclear war; and that he will be advised, persuaded and deterred  against a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia.

This rationality assumption is being tested now by the Kremlin, Security Council, General Staff and the intelligence agencies as they review Trump’s record of bombing Yemen in March, Operation Rough Rider;  his involvement in the attack with Ukrainian proxies on Russia’s nuclear bombers on June 1, Operation Spiderweb;   and finally the US-Israeli war against Iran beginning on June 13 and  ending with Operation Midnight Hammer on June 24,   the US Air Force attack on Iran as reported publicly  by General Daniel Caine, the spetsnaz officer whom Trump has appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  

The clearest recent statement of the rationality standard  applying in an escalating war between nuclear-armed militaries, was spelled out on May 31 by Indian Army General Anil Chauhan, Chief of the Defence Staff. He was explaining India’s conduct of the war with Pakistan which began with Pakistan’s attack in Kashmir on April 22, and concluded with the destruction of Pakistan’s air defences, including its nuclear weapons base, and the ceasefire which took effect on May 10-11.  

“There is a lot of space before the nuclear threshold is crossed,” Chauhan said.    “There is a lot of signalling before that…The most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. That’s because they understand that conflict can swing either way. In every step which happened…I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as their actions. Why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?”

This is the question being discussed behind closed doors in Moscow now — whether the assumption of Trump’s rationality continues to be justified, and if his conduct is creating fresh doubt, what to do about it.

It had been three days after Trump had bombed Iran and after he had proclaimed his obliteration doctrine that Putin said: “we highly value both his domestic policies and his endeavours regarding the Middle East situation, as well as his efforts toward resolving the Ukrainian crisis. I have previously articulated this position and wish to reaffirm it publicly: I am convinced that President Trump is genuinely committed to resolving the issue on the Ukrainian track. Recently, I believe he observed that the matter has proven more intricate than external appearances suggested. That is indeed the case. Such complexity is unsurprising – there exists a substantial difference between distant observation and direct engagement with the issue. The same is true of the Middle East crisis. Although he may have greater experience there, having been more deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs, complexities persist there as well. Real life is always more complex than any notion of it.”  

Putin was restating the strategic assumption that Trump is rational. The evidence of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer, and the failure, as the Russians understand it, of Trump’s war aims – regime change in Tehran, partition of the country,  elimination of the Iranian military’s nuclear-armed missile capabilities against Israel – is far from conclusive.   

 “Iran is now central in the Russian discourse,” comments a Moscow source in a position to know. “Putin will not deviate from the pure diplomacy. There’s a two-track approach. It is part of Russia’s warfighting strategy. We now know that Trump is refusing to come to any of the terms we have tabled in Istanbul for a peace settlement. He keeps threatening to escalate. His record is  showing the US won’t withdraw from the Middle East war and he is refusing to stop running the Ukraine war. So we draw the obvious conclusions. What’s the point of Putin announcing those if Trump shows he isn’t listening, won’t agree, maybe can’t understand?”

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Russia’s master icon painters depicted the male and female faces which are sacred in the Russian Orthodox Church, the noses were always columnar — a long, narrow bridge without curvature – ending in a pointed tip; the lips were exactly as wide as the nostrils on either side of the nose, and the lower lip was full. The cheeks were flat without the prominence of either zygomatic (cheek) bones or flesh. The eyes were always almond-shaped, open without hood (dermatochalasis). The lacrimal caruncle, the tiny circle of flesh in the corner of the eye, did not appear in icons until the seventeenth century.*

The forehead is usually wrinkle-free except that the Mother of God of Kazan displays a vertical line between and above the eyebrows. That glabellar or frown line isn’t from nature; it symbolizes different things, depending on the school of icon painters who painted her.

Realism in icons changes with time just as the secular standard of beauty does in the face. Rank and class, with the money to make plastic change and cosmetic repair, are eternal. Today, with more cash in their pockets, time to expose their skins to the sun on holiday, and the aspiration to rise in social class and display their mobility, Russian men and women are buying more botulinum toxin drugs than ever before. In the latest report this month, consumer spending and unit sales for these drugs are currently jumping by more than a third over the levels recorded a year ago;   they have more than doubled since the war began in 2022.  

Popularly known by the Botox brand name, these drugs are injected in time series to erase wrinkles in the muscular movement of the face, cause lips to pout, and lift hoods over the eyes. Botox is also used to stop excessive sweating, twitching, and drooling. These can be symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome among soldiers returning from the war fronts, but they aren’t the drivers of the Russian Botox boom.

This is not only a boom in consumption of the drugs on the faces of men and women.  It is a boom for Russian pharmaceutical companies to replace French, South Korean, Chinese and other imports of Botox-type pharmaceutical drugs which have been blocked by sanctions:  growth in sales for these Russian Botox makers has been jumping – over the past year, 46% and 63% for the two leading Botox substitutes, Relatox and Miotox.  Also, these products pack three to four times more punch in every shot, or so the Russian marketers, experts and clinics selling cosmetic treatments and plastic surgery are claiming.  

The Russian Botox comes to the people from the people; that’s to say the state.  Relatox, first started in the market in 2014,  is manufactured by Microgen, a subsidiary of the state conglomerate, Rostec.     Miotox is produced by the Chumakov Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences,  a national leader for research in medical virology, manufacturer and marketer.  

When Rostec’s chief executive, Sergei Chemezov, met President Vladimir Putin this month for their annual review of Rostec’s operations, Chemezov mentioned his group’s medical technology contributions to the war, including a new histological data scanner, bioelectric prosthetic devices, and “sponsored trips to health resorts”.  The Kremlin communiqué doesn’t report whether they discussed the boom in Relatox. .

The face-saving claims, not to mention the adverse side effects and the spread of counterfeit drugs, are sensitive subjects which the experts are willing to discuss in the press. There are greater sensitivities, however.  Nikolai Bespalov, an author of the latest Botox market report by RNC Pharma  in Moscow, and Natalia Goltyakova, chief executive of the  GMT Clinic,  were asked what are the social class dynamics of the Botox boom, and what oligarch groups are active in the market  in combination or competition with Rostec and Chumakov,  but they refused to answer.

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by Editor - Monday, June 30th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In warfighting against Russia’s enemies, President Vladimir Putin makes mistakes. He admits as much. Unequalled among the current leaders of the enemy states, he has the capability to correct his mistakes quickly. That’s one of the reasons for his unequalled domestic voter support.

Also, Putin is an attentive listener; he brooks criticism on condition it is not intended in a plan for regime change. Every ten years or so, Putin knows that Russia’s main enemies – the US, Germany, the UK – have come up with, will always come up  with regime-changing schemes employing Trojan horses, Fifth Columns and quislings inside Russia.

These started for Putin with the Chechen secession. After he had defeated that, they were followed by the plotting of the oligarchs around Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky and ended with Alexei Navalny. Putin is well enough educated in the methods of analysis of Marxism-Leninism to understand that for Russia, regime change and warfighting, also class struggle, race war and imperialism, are constant and inevitable.

Because of what the Germans did to the Russian people at the time of his father, mother,  brother,  and uncles, Putin knows there is only the deterrence of superior force to stop the Germans repeating themselves; killing Germans is a generational necessity for Russia’s survival. Putin wishes better but knows – especially now – that the good Germans are outnumbered and outgunned, and the bad Germans are planning for worse with US encouragement and armament, as before.  

With the British and the Americans, Putin has tried a combination of traditional economic inducements, regular espionage, and manipulation in the manner of Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Trust.* In the calculus of the force required for divide-and-rule and warfighting against the Anglo-American empires, Putin has also understood that time is needed to rebuild Russia’s capacities, economic and military, from the level of destruction which Washington inflicted through the time of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin capitulations. In correcting his predecessors’ mistakes and their misjudgements of the Americans, Putin has been a quick study but a slow learner.

Then there is Putin’s philosemitism in dealing with the Jewish state. Joseph Stalin believed Israel  to be an anti-imperial ally, but it has turned into a battleship for the empire in destroying all of Russia’s traditional Arab allies, and now Iran — the last holdout before Putin must fight a war on the southern front.

There, Putin’s policy towards Iran combines two hundred years of Russian trial-and-error, some of the errors fatal ones.   

In the tradition of male loyalties in the Russian tusovka – mishpocha is the Jewish concept – Putin is both comfortable with and dutiful towards the Jewish men he shared his Leningrad boyhood with. Such loyalty is lifelong.  No Russian can forget – even if Americans, Germans and British make a point and policy of forgetting  – that they survived the war but not their grandparents, fathers, brothers and womenfolk. Putin has been persuaded that the 15% of Israel’s population who are Russian by language, history, and habit are an extension of the tusovka to which he should show the loyalty which survivors must show each other.

There has been nothing comparable towards the Iranian side; towards the Arab world, genuine Russian sympathy and cultural orientalism died with Yevgeny Primakov (1929-2015). Ties of trade, investment, and military cooperation are a poor substitute, as unpredictable and as fraudulent as the spot and future markets in commodities, including money itself.

In this podcast recorded yesterday, Dimitri Lascaris discusses the lessons Putin and the Russian General Staff are learning from the Iran war, both to guide their next steps for the security of the southern front, and also for negotiating and fighting the war in the Ukrainian sector of the western front.

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by Editor - Friday, June 27th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump and the Israelis cannot accept that in this round of the war against Iran, they are losing escalation control.

Trump and the NATO allies will not accept that this is what Russia is taking from them on the Ukrainian battlefield.

In the history of the world it has never happened before that people with superiority complexes as all-consuming as Trump’s, the Israelis’, and the NATO leaders’ can’t see through the dark to their toilet, and when they get there to do their business,  they can’t flush because their electricity and water supplies have been destroyed by missile attack.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

According to the Unified Rules of Boxing issued by the US Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, when the bell sounds for the end of each round, there is a “rest period” before the boxers resume their fight, or one retires too hurt to continue.

The ceasefire between Israel and Iran which President Donald Trump (lead image, left, right) has congratulated himself for arranging is the bell sounding for the rest period to begin.

Iran’s rope-a-dope strategy allows rest periods.  But for this strategy to succeed, the rest periods must be too short for Israel to be re-supplied by the US, Germany and other allies, compared to the re-supply arrangements which Iran is now trying to make with Russia, China, North Korea and other sources.

Since Trump’s first announcement allowed Israel and Iran to continue striking each other for six hours, his deadline was roughly 7 am Teheran time today, June 24.  In reply, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, announced “there is NO ‘agreement’ on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations. However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Teheran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards.”   

According to Trump, “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’”   Trump has then claimed he had forced them. “We couldn’t have made today’s ‘deal’ without the talent and courage of our great B-2 pilots, and all of those associated with that operation. In a certain and very ironic way, that perfect ‘hit’, late in the evening, brought everyone together, and the deal was made!!!”  

Sources in Moscow say the terms of the Trump “deal” are quite different.

On the one hand, according to the sources, Trump understands that unless he orders a halt to US arms supplies and battlefield intelligence to the regime in Kiev, Russia will not halt its arms supplies and intelligence-sharing with Iran. The sources add that for the time being Iran is not requesting fresh Russian aid. “Several individuals have been moved under Russian protection; these are individuals and families who have been moved into Russia. North Korean deliveries have been crucial in the run-up — they are basically Chinese. So Iran has not been lacking. They have been ready.  Also, they have the capacity to fire several large missiles per day for several weeks, if not months, which the Israelis and Americans cannot stop. These will get through to Israel’s water, gas, and electricity plants, other fuel supplies, and ports.”

The assessment in Moscow is that Iran has demonstrated it has escalation control for the long term, and that in the short term Israel needs US re-supply, re-financing, and recovery more urgently than Iran. In exchange for Trump’s “ceasefire” to meet the Israeli requests, President Vladimir Putin has communicated that Trump must do nothing to block the acceleration of Russia’s offensive in the Ukraine.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Muhammad Ali famously demonstrated the rope-a-dope strategy in the Zaire title bout  against George Forman in October 1974, he allowed Foreman to start attacking him against the ropes in Round 3. By Round 7 Foreman had exhausted his punching strength. In Round 8, Foreman dropped his guard, and Ali counterattacked with a combination of punches which knocked Foreman out.  

Watch carefully how it was done in seven punches, eight seconds.   

According to General Daniel Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US has knocked out Iran’s nuclear enrichment and nuclear weapon preparation plants with “extremely severe destruction”;     “completely and totally”, according to President Donald Trump.   

The punches were delivered by “tactical surprise”, Caine has announced, with a “deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders here in Washington.” He said the “strike packages” comprised more than 125 aircraft and one submarine. They fired 16 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, more than 24 Tomahawk missiles, and a total of 75 precision-guided weapons at three land targets – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. According to Caine’s report, no Iranian shot was fired against the US attackers as they flew on to these targets nor “on the way out.”    Instead, “decoys” and “preemptive suppressing fires” were launched. “Iran’s fighters did not fly,” Caine claims, “and it appears that Iran’s surface-to-air missile systems did not see us. Throughout the mission we retained the element of surprise.”

The entire operation took 25 minutes. That’s the equivalent in the boxing ring of seven rounds. Iran reports the US had telegraphed its punches with advance notice that the bombing raid would be restricted to the three land targets.

Knocking out the Iranian leadership, including military and civilian leaders, plus Ayatollah Ali Kamenei, has been denied by Vice President JD Vance,   then reasserted by Trump.  

“No other military in the world,” said Caine, “could have done this.”

Iran has not acknowledged that rope-a-dope is its warfighting strategy. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepares for his meetings on Monday with Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has issued a warning to Russia and China that they are failing to do enough to meet longstanding assistance promises and treaty obligations. “We may forget the words of our enemies, but never the silence of our friends,” the IRGC media platform Sepahi News has announced just after midnight on Monday morning (June 23). “After going through this sensitive situation, there will undoubtedly be a serious review of relations with some countries.”  The text was accompanied by a picture of Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping together at a ceremony shaking hands.

The former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, spokesman for the Security Council, has issued a personal declaration supporting Iran’s war against both the US and Israel, and implying not only that Israel is losing the war,  but also there is Kremlin backing for the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. “The critical infrastructure of the nuclear cycle appears not to have been damaged or even slightly affected.  The enrichment of nuclear materials, and now we can say it,  the future production of nuclear weapons, will continue. A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their nuclear ammunition. Israel is under attack — thundering explosions, people in panic. The United States is drawn into a new conflict with the prospect of a ground operation. The Iranian political regime has been preserved, and with a high degree of probability it has become stronger.”  

“With such successes,” added Medvedev for the General Staff and intelligence services, “[we don’t see] Trump [winning] the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the utter venality of this nomination. Good start — congratulations, Mr. President!”  

This is Russian for rope-a-dope.

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by Editor - Monday, June 23rd, 2025
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